What to Do in Woodinville After the Tasting Rooms Close
If the tasting rooms have closed and you are not ready to go home, Rooneys Sports Bar is open until 2 a.m. every night at 17626 140th Ave NE in the Woodinville Towne Center. Full kitchen, full bar, pool tables, 20 TVs and free parking.
This is the question a lot of people end up asking around six o’clock on a Saturday in Woodinville. You have had a good afternoon, the last pour is done, the tasting room is flipping chairs, and nobody in the group wants the day to be over. Woodinville is one of the best wine destinations in the country from about eleven to five. After that, the options thin out fast.
The gap in Woodinville’s day
Woodinville has well over a hundred wineries and tasting rooms packed into a few square miles, and almost all of them keep daytime hours. Most close by 5 or 6 p.m. A handful of restaurants run later. And then there is a genuine gap between when wine country shuts down and when anyone is actually ready to call it a night.
That gap is most of what Rooneys is. We are a locally owned sports bar that keeps the lights on and the kitchen running until last call, seven nights a week, and a good share of the people who walk in on a weekend evening got here by way of a tasting room.
Eat something real
The single most useful thing after an afternoon of tasting is food, and not a cheese board.
The kitchen here does scratch pub food: house-ground burgers, hand-cut wings in five sauces, Mondo Nachos built to share, bacon cheese tots, a Bavarian-style brew house pretzel with house queso, bacon-wrapped jalapeños and coconut shrimp. Nothing precious about it. It is the food you actually want at seven o’clock after a day of tasting flights, and the kitchen keeps going long after the restaurants in the valley have stopped seating.
There is a late-night menu from 10 p.m. to midnight on top of that, which is why so many of our regulars are industry people coming off a restaurant or tasting-room shift. If you have ever wondered where the Woodinville service industry eats after work, this is a large part of the answer.
You can see the full menu here.
Change what is in your glass
After five hours of wine, most people want something different, and this is where a sports bar with a serious back bar earns its keep.
Rooneys is locally owned and the bottle wall shows it. There is an extensive whiskey, bourbon and scotch collection, genuinely one of the deeper lists on the Eastside, alongside 12 beers on tap and scratch cocktails. A neat Kentucky bourbon or a cold pint is a very effective palate reset.
Happy hour runs 3 to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday, so if you finish your tasting early you can walk straight into it.
Actually do something
The other thing about the after-tasting hours is that sitting is not always what people want. They have been standing at bars and sitting at tables all day.
Rooneys has two of the only real pool tables left in Woodinville, two league-ready electronic dartboards, Golden Tee, Godzilla pinball, shuffleboard, a Touch Tunes jukebox so your group picks the soundtrack, and 30 pull-tab bowls if you want to try your luck. Pool is free all day on Thursdays.
It turns a nightcap into an actual evening, which is the difference between one more drink and a night people remember.
There is something on every night
If you time it right, you walk into more than a bar:
- Monday — Martini Monday, $9 Tito’s martinis and $9 Buffalo Trace Manhattans. Industry Monday runs 10% off from 8 p.m. to close for service-industry workers
- Tuesday — Taco Tuesday, $2 tacos with any beverage, $6 house margaritas, $4 Pacifico
- Wednesday — Beat the Geek Trivia at 7 p.m. Bring a team
- Thursday — Tequila Thursday, free pool all day, and Open Mic Comedy at 9 p.m. with sign-ups at 8:30
- Friday and Saturday — Karaoke with Sandra Dee at 9:30 p.m.
- Sunday — Game day, with every screen on whatever matters
No cover for any of it. The full weekly lineup is here.
Watch whatever is on
There are 20 big-screen TVs and a 12-foot projector screen running DirecTV and Comcast, which means whatever game is happening is on. Seahawks, Mariners, Kraken, Huskies, Cougs, Sounders, Reign, and most of what else is being broadcast.
Football season is about to make this considerably more interesting. The Seahawks are the defending Super Bowl champions and open at home on September 9, which means autumn Saturdays and Sundays in Woodinville are going to have a very different shape than summer ones.
The practical details
- Address: 17626 140th Ave NE, Woodinville, WA 98072, in the Woodinville Towne Center
- Hours: 11 a.m. to 2 a.m., every day
- Parking: free, in the lot
- Age policy: 21 and over at all times, bring ID
- Reservations: not needed. Walk in and grab a stool. For groups, call (425) 481-3586 or use our Private Events page
- Takeout: call the same number
If your group is coming straight from a tasting room and there are more than a handful of you, a phone call ahead of time means we can have space ready.
One more thing about wine country evenings
The tasting rooms are what bring people to Woodinville, and they are genuinely excellent at what they do. But a full day out needs somewhere to land afterward, and for a lot of people that has meant driving back toward Seattle or Bellevue for dinner.
It does not have to. There is a room fifteen minutes from most of the tasting rooms with the kitchen open, the games running, a serious whiskey list and a pool table free on Thursdays.
We are open until 2. Come find us.
