Alcohol-Free Things to Do in Albuquerque

Lost Cultures Tea Bar is a fully non-alcoholic bar in Albuquerque's Sawmill District where owner Ryan Brown builds cocktails out of tea rather than out of spirit substitutes. The Ancient Fashioned is pu'erh tea with sugar, orange bitters and wood smoke; the Smokey Rose runs lapsang souchong against grapefruit, lemon, rose simple syrup and foaming bitters; the paloma is built on chamomile with lime, agave and grapefruit soda. Kombucha is poured alongside. Brown does not use the word mocktail for any of it, and the room is a genuine bar rather than a tea shop with a late licence — Friday and Saturday it runs to 10pm.

Electric Playhouse is an immersive projection-mapped venue on Albuquerque's west side — interactive games and light across whole rooms — with a full bar attached, and it names its mocktails the way it names everything else: Cocowatts, Nebula, Surge, Power Outage. It is explicitly family-friendly and all-ages, which makes it one of very few places in this directory where a group can include children, a designated driver and someone in recovery without any of them being an afterthought. Open from 10am Wednesday through Sunday, to 8pm midweek and 10pm on Friday and Saturday.

UrbanMama505 is a kombuchery and elixir bar on Central Avenue run by Julie Morrell and Ted Archuleta, brewing its own kombucha from organic teas and pouring it as flights — lime, lavender, rose hips, and a Black Guatemalan made with cold-brew coffee. Nothing served contains alcohol. Morrell's framing of why it exists is the clearest statement of this directory's premise anyone has made: the culture always asks what you're drinking, and they want people to know that does not always mean alcohol. The hours are narrow — Friday and Saturday only — so plan around them. The building is a plain cement-block unit on Central, easy to drive past.

Campo is the restaurant at Los Poblanos, the historic inn and organic farm in the Rio Grande valley north of Albuquerque, and it grows a great deal of what it serves — including the lavender fields the property is known for. Its non-alcoholic drinks come out of that: a Los Poblanos lavender lemonade made from the farm's own crop, and a Morning Remedy on the breakfast menu. A working farm is the ideal pantry for alcohol-free drinking, because the produce is the point and the spirit was never carrying the flavour. Breakfast from 8am Thursday through Sunday, dinner from 5pm nightly.

M'tucci's Bar Roma is the Nob Hill room of a local Italian restaurant group, on Central Avenue, and its alcohol-free drinks are built on house shrubs — pineapple rosemary and blueberry raspberry among them. Shrubs are the most useful thing a restaurant can make for a non-drinker: fruit preserved in vinegar and sugar, they bring sharp acidity and a savoury edge that no juice can, and they hold up across a meal instead of cloying. Italian dining is also where the aperitivo ritual lives, so a bar making its own shrubs can give a non-drinker something to do at the start of dinner. Open 11am daily, to 10pm and 11pm at weekends.

Seasons Rotisserie & Grill is a long-standing restaurant near Old Town on Mountain Road, with a rooftop cantina above the dining room, and its contribution to this guide is an elevated Shirley Temple — which sounds like a joke and is not. The Shirley Temple is the drink most often handed to adults who are not drinking, usually badly made from bottled grenadine and flat lemonade; a kitchen that takes it seriously enough to rebuild it properly is making a specific point about who it is serving. Open from 4pm most nights and 3pm at weekends, closed Tuesday.

TEN 3 sits at 10,300 feet on Sandia Peak, reachable only by the Sandia Peak Tramway, and it is the most spectacular place in New Mexico to order a drink of any kind — the room looks out over eleven thousand square miles of desert. Its mocktails are named for the setting: On Mountain Thyme and Elevation Elixir. Because the only way up is the tram, and the tram has a schedule, this is a planned outing rather than a stop, and it works particularly well as an alcohol-free one given that altitude amplifies alcohol considerably. Book the restaurant and the tram together, and check the weather, which closes the tramway at short notice.

Tula's Kitchen is a restaurant on Wyoming Boulevard in north Albuquerque, a sister brand to the New Mexico pizza institution Dion's, and its drinks list is built entirely without alcohol: teas, lemonades, Italian sodas, coffee mocktails and house soft drinks. That is unusual for a full-service restaurant — not a bar with a zero-proof section but a dining room where the whole beverage programme is alcohol-free, so nobody at the table is drinking anything anyone else cannot. Open 11am to 9pm through the week and to 10pm on Friday and Saturday, seven days.