New website helps you find cheap drinks, eats

Cheap drinks? Eats? A.J.Maher's got the scoop at cvilledrinkspecial.com
PHOTO COURTESY A.J. MAHER

Dish recently stumbled on a local website called cvilledrinkspecials.com, which lists the various drink and some food specials at over 30 restaurants around town. It’s quite an undertaking, considering that ABC laws don’t allow restaurant to advertise such specials. But according to the site’s creator, UVA grad A.J. Maher, it feeds a need (or quenches a thirst).

“Last winter. my friends and I decided it was a pain in the a** to call bars all the time to figure out what the specials are,” says Maher. “ Since the ABC won't let them advertise happy hours and specials, we saw a need for a one-stop resource.”

Indeed, in addition to some fabulous drink specials on the list, there are some great food deals as well. At the Biltmore, salads, sandwiches, and burgers are $5 on Wednesdays, and over at St. Maarten’s, you can get a pork BBQ sandwich with fries for $4.99. On Mondays at Wild Wing Caf© there are $1 kid's meals, and over at Bel Rio they have $5 entrees along with some great wine and beer specials.

It also sounds like Maher wouldn’t mind some help, maybe some folks sending him some email or tweets about the latest deals (), as updating the site is time consuming and not terribly lucrative.

“It's only made me $14 in the four months of its existence, from Google ads, and I can't sell ads to the bars."

Still, he sounds an enthusiastic note about why he created it, "Surely other financially-struggling students and penny-wise locals were looking for food and drinks on the cheap too."