At Bahama Breeze, sharing a few appetizers over drinks in the bar is a big part of how customers experience the brand.

Bar menus—especially those that focus on shareable, snackable items instead of on main courses—draw in guests for drinks and noshes with friends, offering them the social and entertainment aspects they enjoy about dining away from home minus the commitment to more-formal and potentially more costly sit-down meals. Such menus also build business beyond typical mealtimes for afternoon snacks, after-work gatherings and late-night bites. Enticing bar menus can encourage guests to linger longer and indulge in multiple drinks—the big moneymaker for operators.

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“Bar appetizers should be a quick, easy eat,” Skall says. “Customers are looking for fun, accessible foods—they don’t want to dig into a whole big plate they have to spend a lot of time on.”

Fun, accessible and easy are common themes when it comes to bar snacks, whether they’re unique dishes on dedicated menus or regular appetizers that guests can order in the dining room or the bar.

Also important is quick pickup times for kitchens—less than 10 minutes is ideal—and enough choices to allow guests to find a good match for a variety of drinks. For many restaurants, that means balancing fresh spins on popular fare such as sliders, poppers and guacamole (see sidebars below for creative ideas) with a few unique signature items.

At contemporary American restaurants Rae and Gayle in Philadelphia, Chef-owner Daniel Stern’s signature happy-hour snack is risotto fingers, a play on the fried Italian rice balls called arancini that are quickly becoming a fixture on bar and appetizer menus.

Meatball sliders please diners craving snacks or sandwiches at Rocca.

“At the bar, you want food you can eat while you still have a drink in your hand, something that’s not going to make a mess, anything in bite-sized pieces that’s a little salty to complement whatever you’re drinking,” Stern says.

Menuing choices at a range of price points is another good strategy; it appeases guests looking for a deal as well as those interested in higher-end dishes. At Fleming’s, appetizers available at the bar include a recently introduced stuffed, roasted red-pepper for $9.99 and lobster tempura with jalapeño jelly and soy-ginger sauce for $24.

For the lobster, 4-ounce coldwater tails are split in half, tempura-battered and fried. Tempura vegetables—such as thinly sliced red bell peppers, portobello mushrooms and asparagus—add color to the mix and help bulk up the plate, Skall says.

Bites such as Shrimp Cupcakes reflect Bong Su’s Vietnamese heritage.

Soul, a Southern-accented upscale restaurant in the Chicago suburb of Clarendon Hills, Ill., runs a weekly promotion called Craft Beer Mondays to draw out diners on the typically slow night. While Executive Chef Karen Nicolas regularly changes the bar menu that accompanies the $4 beer specials, a recent offering of beer-braised pretzels with beer cheese captures the basics of her strategy.

“It’s familiar, it’s approachable and it tastes good,” she says. “I try to cook with the beer we have in house, so I look at those flavors and try to think of something that goes well.”

The pretzel twists are poached briefly in water and beer (a white ale) to give them a soft, chewy texture and to let them pick up some of the beer’s flavor before being finished in the oven. For the warm cheese sauce that comes on the side, Nicolas melts Gruyère and smoked Cheddar with a little goat’s milk and a rich, dark beer that stands up to the recipe’s strong flavors.

Snacks at Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink include fried hominy, deviled eggs and crostini. GET THE RECIPE: Crispy Fried Hominy

Fried Cheddar cheese curds are a Midwestern incarnation of ever-popular fried cheese sticks. The bright-orange curds, shipped in twice a week from Wisconsin, are coated in panko crumbs mixed with cayenne pepper, paprika and fresh thyme. Freezing the curds prior to frying helps them come out crisp on the outside and gooey on the inside.

For the stuffed olives, house-made sausage—chorizo, wild boar or lamb—is stuffed into split colossal green cocktail olives with the pimientos removed. The olives get the same panko breading as the fried cheese curds.

Chorizo-stuffed fried olives fit well with the beverage culture at 8 oz.

Global influences make ideal jumping-off points for kitchens trying to develop original bar snacks. At Bong Su in San Francisco, Chef Tammy Huynh’s Shrimp Cupcakes offer a bite-size riff on the lacy Vietnamese crêpes called báhn xèo.

For the báhn xèo batter, rice flour and coconut milk are mixed with cooked rice that is soaked in water and then puréed (the rice purée helps yield a crunchier exterior, Huynh says). The batter is made ahead for fast pickup; to order, it is poured into the “cupcake” mold, a small cast-iron plate (similar to those used to cook escargot) with seven round indentations. A small, whole shrimp is placed in each cupcake.

After cooking on the stovetop, the delicate, savory cakes are carefully removed from the mold and garnished with sautéed green onions and dried shrimp flakes. Huynh’s dipping sauce combines fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, water and chile sauce to balance the sweet, salty and sour flavors that are a staple of Vietnamese cuisine.

For Orlando-based Bahama Breeze, incorporating the casual-dining chain’s Caribbean theme lends unique accents to a broad selection of cocktail-friendly appetizers. One signature recipe uses tostones—the popular island staple of sliced green plantains that are fried, smashed and fried again—as a base for a nachos-style dish piled high with sweet peppers, mushrooms, onions, cheese and salsa. Guests familiar with traditional tostones also often request them as a snack on their own, seasoned simply with garlic salt and a squeeze of lime, says Rick Crossland, senior vice president of culinary and beverage.

Chicago’s Hub 51 boasts a 20-foot-long bar and dedicates about 20% of its 10,000 square-foot-space to hightop bar seating. Needless to say, many of the upscale-casual restaurant’s appetizers—served until midnight nightly—were designed to match well with cocktails, wine and beer.

The most distinctive offering is Three Green Bites, a divided tray of steamed, salted edamame; blistered Padrón peppers (sweet Spanish green chiles); and tempura green beans with spicy mayonnaise and soy sauce for dipping. Co-owner R.J. Melman says the produce-driven choice makes sense at the bar. “A lot of times bar snacks are really heavy, but if you’re trying to promote drinking, you want a lighter snack,” he says.

At Rocca Kitchen and Bar in Boston, a late-night menu is available until 1 a.m. five nights a week. Chef Tom Fosnot says that after 10 p.m., most guests want quick snacks with assertive, familiar flavors. Because customers in the lounge tend to be in larger groups, it’s also important for the bar menu to provide crowd-pleasing portions and satisfy all kinds of tastes, he says.

Many of Rocca’s offerings, such as fried cauliflower with garlic aïoli, honey-glazed duck wings and marinated olives, fall into the small-bites category. Guests craving a sandwich can get meatball sliders topped with provolone, tomatoes and arugula or a prosciutto panino with salami, provolone, arugula, tomatoes and olive tapenade. Fosnot rounds out the special menu with one salad (escarole, radicchio and romaine greens with red-wine vinaigrette and shaved Parmigiano) and one more-substantial plate, baked rigatoni.

“I wouldn’t say they’re our biggest sellers, but in terms of production it’s not any more difficult, and you want to do the best you can to satisfy a whole group of people,” he says.

Dessert is available, too, and Fosnot’s Smashed Almond Bark is particularly well-suited to the bar setting. Ground, toasted almonds mixed with sugar are folded into a stiff meringue with caramelized almonds. The mixture is spread thin in a sheet pan, baked and broken into crisp shards, and then served with a dark-chocolate dipping sauce that is punched up with rum and espresso.

“Fun is always really important in a bar menu,” Fosnot says. “People want to be a little bit surprised. They’re not looking for something serious.”