Turn happy hour into a progressive dinner

Eatery A offers enough variations of wood-fired pizzas to merit repeat visits, especially during happy hour. (Photo: Eatery A)

By Mary Jane Miller

Going out to dinner is fun. Progressive dinners are fun, too. And progressive happy-hour hopping is even more fun.

For our anniversary this year, my husband and I couldn’t decide among three restaurants, so we decided to go to them all. Happy-hour specials are generally small plates meant to be shared, so it was easy to make three stops, enjoy three courses and finish early enough to catch a show — or to simply head home for dessert.

We started at the Cheese Bar, at 2925 Ingersoll Ave., where happy hour runs from 2 to 5 p.m. We snagged a table and enjoyed a small tray of savory pot stickers with a spicy-sticky sauce and an order of blistered shishito peppers dusted with Parmesan. The pizza roll looked good, but we were saving room for another pizza in our near future.

Across the street at Eatery A, at 2932 Ingersoll Ave., the happy hour goes from 2 to 6 p.m., an hour longer. The menu leans into Mediterranean flavors, and we had a wood-fired pizza topped with beef kofta, feta, onion, tzatziki sauce and cilantro.

Finally, just down the street is Harbinger, at 2724 Ingersoll Ave., where the specials run from 4 to 6 p.m. When we stopped in, the menu offered Japanese-style skewers (yakitori) of marinated lion’s mane mushrooms with horseradish and leeks. The soft milk-bread toast is topped with caramelized leeks , drizzled with a prosciutto XO sauce, and five-spice pickled apples. They also had steamed buns filled with pork belly, fried chicken or butternut squash. Why not get all three? We’ll have to come back for the ginger roasted beet dumplings (gyoza).

The menus at the Cheese Bar and Harbinger change with the seasons, and Eatery A has a long list of pizzas, so this early night out deserves repeating.

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