The Happy Hour Tour: White Dog, Black Cat

210 S Broadway

Green Bay, WI 54303

(920) 445-0440

whitedogblackcatgb.com

Parking: Free Street Parking (gotta love the Midwest!)

Days: Tuesday-Thursday Time: 4-6pm

Drink Deals: 3 Domestic Beers for $4; 2 Single Shot Rail Mixers for $5; Buy One Shot, get 2nd half-off

Food Deals: Nada on the Food Deals

Nightly Specials (from 7pm-Close):

--- Tuesday: Any Import $3 with purchase of Dinner Special; $4 Pinnical Flavored Pints

--- Wednesday – All You Care to Drink House Wine for $10; $2.50 Bud and Bud Light Bottles

--- Thursday – $2 Pabst Bottles; $3 Jameson or Michael Collins Shots; $4 (call) Whiskey Pints

When friends and colleagues asked where I was going for my short February vacation, they got a kick out of the answer… “Green Bay, Wisconsin.” No offense to Packer Land, but I might as well have said Antarctica, leaving sunny Southern California for this wintry small city on the Bay. It wasn’t a Lambeau Field tour that brought me; it was the arrival of my niece, a sweet little babe with a full head of hair.

While I was of course in Green Bay to shower love on the little love-bug – no long weekend trip would have been complete without a Happy Hour stop or two. So on a cold, but not freezing afternoon, brother (and Beer Maestro) PB and I left my sis-in-law and a sleeping Baby B at home and headed for a mini-Happy Hour Tour.

After visiting UrbanSpoon’s hit-and-miss Happy Hour listings (really, sometimes, the restaurants ranked high for Happy Hours don’t even have them!), we decided to start at White Dog Black Cat – a ½ café, ½ bar in the downtown area. On a Happy Hour Tour, we opted for the bar side of the restaurant and made nice with the bartender who helpfully pointed me in the direction of the Spotted Cow beer from the New Glarus Brewing Company in Wisconsin.

Two-Hearted Ale and a Spotted Cow

We found that Happy Hour consisted of drink deals only featuring prices much better than anything I see in LA – 3 domestic beers for $4 and 2 for $5 Rail Mixers. My Spotted Cow and PB’s floral and hoppy Two-Hearted Ale were not on special, but only cost about $8 total, so not a bad deal. As for food, appetizers run from about $3.95 to $6.95, but we were more intrigued by the special of the day, a fried fish plate with fries, coleslaw, and pumpernickel bread for $7.95.

Yummers! Fish and Chips; Coleslaw and Pumpernickel Bread - all this for $7.95!

PB has learned that when someone recommends a restaurant here, it’s not so much based on the quality of the food, but the quantity and we found this true at White Dog, Black Cat – the plate had enough fish to feed us both! The quality was all right too, though a bit too much batter for our palate. Still, how damn cool to pay about $20 for 2 beers and dinner!!

The whole bar had a café kind of look with antique knick-knacks and big cozy chairs and loveseats in the front. The bar definitely had a Midwest kind of feel, and it was fun to see something like 8 dudes enjoying afternoon brews, lined up on the bar-front stools. Dudes!!

Da Bar Side of the Joint (the dudes got there later)

We headed out and attempted stops at 2 more Broadway St. bars to not-so-good results – the first was the Sardine Can (seriously, visit the site and the story makes sense) and our arrival there was something like straight out of a movie. I swear the music stopped, we got stared at from head to toe, and a highly intoxicated man’s hand froze in the air mid-wave. Given this and the fact that the only other females there were the bartenders, I kindly made PB back-up “gracefully” and run out of the bar to the amusement of the gawking patrons. The scene at the next stop, a southern restaurant called Taste of the South, wasn’t nearly as dramatic, but they also didn’t seem to have a real bar. C’est la vie as the New Orleans folks might say.