With nudge from the young, mocktails taking hold
Five years ago, for her 27th birthday, Lorelei Bandrovschi gave up drinking for a month on a dare. She was a casual drinker and figured it would be easy. It was, but she hadn’t banked on learning so much about herself in the process.
“I realized that going out without drinking was something that I really enjoyed and that I was very well suited for,” she says. “I realized I’m a pretty extroverted, spontaneous, uninhibited person.”
And that’s how Listen Bar was born in downtown Manhattan, on Bleecker Street. At just under a year old, the bar that Bandrovschi opens only once a month is alcoholfree, one of a growing number of sober bars popping up around the country.
Boozefree bars serving elevated “mocktails” are attracting more young people than ever before, especially women. The uptick comes as fewer people overall are drinking alcohol away from home and the #MeToo movement has women seeking a more comfortable bar environment, says Amanda Topper, associate director of foodservice research for the global market research firm Mintel.
Mocktails aren’t just proliferating at sober bars. Regular bars and restaurants are cluing into the idea that alcoholfree customers want more than a Shirley Temple or a splash of cranberry with a spritz.
Alcoholfree mixed drinks grew 35 percent as a beverage type on the menus of bars and restaurants from 2016 to this year, according to Mintel. Topper says 17 percent of 1,288 people surveyed between the ages of 22 to 24 who drink away from home says
they’re interested in mocktails.
The interest, she says, is also driven in part by the health and wellness movement, and the availability of higher quality ingredients as bartenders take mocktails more seriously.
“It really started a few years ago with the whole idea of dry January, when consumers cut out alcohol for that month,” Topper says. “It’s shifted to a longterm movement and lifestyle choice.”
Listen Bar recently hosted a mocktail competition for mixologists, who whipped up drinks that included The Holy Would, comprised of citrusy, distilled, nonalcoholic Seedlip Grove 42, palo santo syrup, lowacid apple juice, lemon and lime bitters produced with glycerin, and verjus, the pressed juice of unripened grapes. The drink is the brainchild of Fred Beebe, a bartender at Sunday in Brooklyn. The restaurant isn’t alcoholfree, but Beebe helped create an extensive mocktail menu that goes well beyond the sugary choices of yore, using unique ingredients.
Palo santo, for instance, is a tree native to Peru, Venezuela and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula that loosely translates to “holy wood” and is widely used in folk remedies.
“Everybody should be able to have a delicious drink at a bar,” Beebe says. “Hospitality is making sure everybody has a good time. Alcohol, for me, is not the most important part of a cocktail anymore. The cool juices and syrups and tinctures and mixtures and all that stuff makes a lot of the fun.”
Listen Bar has enjoyed packed houses every month. Photographer Zach Hilty, 40, was a firsttime guest on competition night. He says he drinks alcohol occasionally.
“My girlfriend and I are interested in the health benefits of different botanicals and such,” he says.
Cat Tjan, 27, of Jersey City, New Jersey, was also on hand and brought a colleague, Ammar Farooqi, 26, from Williamstown in southern New Jersey. Neither drinks alcohol. Tjan says Listen Bar is the only sober bar she could find in Manhattan, where she works for a drug company.
“I have no interest in it,” she says of booze. “It’s not particularly fun. It’s very expensive. There are better ways to have a good night out.”
Many bartenders will mix up regular cocktails and just leave out the alcohol if you ask, but that’s different than choosing something conceived as virgin from a separate menu, Farooqi says. Mocktails generally cost a few dollars less than cocktails, but separate menus are still hard to find.
At the sober bar Getaway in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, mocktails go for $13 a pop. There’s the Paper Train, with lemon juice, tobacco syrup (from the leaf and containing no nicotine), vanilla and San Pellegrino Chinotto. And there’s A Trip to Ikea, a mix of lingonberry, lemon, vanilla, cardamom and cream. Getaway opened in April in a permanent space.
At Listen Bar, Tjan and Farooqi sipped on a mocktail dubbed Me, A Houseplant, a green concoction comprised of Seedlip’s Garden 108 variety (the one with the peas), cucumber, lemon and elderflower. Each glass was garnished with a hefty cucumber slice. It was thought up by Jack McGarry, cofounder of the boozeserving Dead Rabbit bar in lower Manhattan and a wellknown mixologist.
McGarry is also three years sober. At Listen Bar’s “Good AF Awards,” he was one of the judges, clipboard in hand.
“Alcoholfree used to be very simplistic with, like, homemade lemonades and ginger ales. People are wanting more diverse offerings,” he says.
“I’m intrigued at how it will all shake out. I’ve seen lots of trends come and go. When people come in asking for nonalcoholic drinks, we have a bunch of drinks that have been thought out.”