Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab

It’s worth playing a little hooky for this plush downtown dining room’s afternoon bargains. Weekdays between 2:30 and 6, you can score half-price oysters, plus discounted snacks such as the restaurant’s fried chicken, French-dip sliders, and lobster deviled eggs. Just as good: half-price wine and beer and $8.50 Hemingway daiquiris and bourbon smashes, among other classic cocktails.

Apero

Feeling fancy? Head to this chic George-town hideaway’s “Caviar Hour” between 4 and 6 pm and 9 and 10 pm Tuesday through Thursday. Caviar-and-Champagne deals for two run $42 to $120 (the latter includes a bottle of bubbly), and there are $5 snacks plus $9 martinis, glasses of Crémant, and more.

The Imperial

It’s not unusual these days for a dozen oysters to run you $50. Which makes this Adams Morgan spot’s Wednesday-night Tower Hour—it runs from 5 to 10—that much more alluring. Shellfish towers are half off and range from a $15 array of oysters, shrimp cocktail, and trout rillettes to a $101 feast that includes snow-crab legs, crab imperial, two dozen oysters, a whole lobster, and more.

Daru

Co-owner Dante Datta’s cocktails are as much of a draw as the innovative Indian cooking at this slim dining room off H Street. Find a short list of them—such as a gin-lime-and-apricot refresher—for $10 every day from 5 to 6:30. If happy hour is doubling as dinner, go for a $10 plate of chicken tikka masala with rice and naan, or just graze on $5 riffs on street food.

Parc de Ville

This charmer of a French bistro in the Mosaic District has date-night-friendly weekday deals such as a cheese plate and two glasses of wine for $22, or a half dozen oysters and two glasses of Muscadet for $32. Meanwhile, French wines are $7 a glass, pineapple-and-cassis French martinis are $12, and there’s sale pricing on the kitchen’s very tasty smash burger and onion soup.

This article appears in the August 2023 issue of Washingtonian.