You might have noticed that whenever my byline is under this column, I talk about food in the first few paragraphs and then the drink later. This is because whenever I imbibe in anything alcoholic, I'm usually doing it during Happy Hour. My thinking is: Why would I pay full price for booze when I can have it for less and also eat some discounted food to boot?
Prego's Happy Hour is especially nice. It offers pizzas with puffy crusts for $5 and a tender grilled calamari steak drizzled with lemon and diavola for $6. But the best bite you can have for $6 is the arancini, deep-fried risotto balls bursting meat sauce and cheese. Since a typical entree outside Prego's Happy Hour hovers in the neighborhood of $20, these are significant price cuts, especially for bites that easily transcend typical Happy Hour fodder.
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And my Happy Hour drink of choice to pair with it? Not the $4.50 draft beer nor the $4.75 house wine, but the drink that bears the restaurant's name: The Prego Martini, a pinkish cocktail whose fruitiness is sweet but never cloying.
Since it's essentially just a mix of the blueberry and pomegranate flavor of vodkas from Pinnacle–a brand that I found out later boasts a Cinnabon and pumpkin pie flavor, if you can believe it–it's not really a martini. But the drink does have a splash of cranberry juice and a squeeze of lime, which tastes especially good against the cheese and seafood-heavy apps.
No, I don't know how much the drink costs outside of Happy Hour, and since I don't intend to order it during any other time, I probably never will. I only know that it's $6.50 between 4 p.m.-7 p.m., at the bar, and only on weekdays–and that's cheap enough for me.
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.
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