Best Sober Date Night Spots in Cleveland

Cleveland's alcohol-free scene has two centres of gravity, and neither is downtown. Ohio City holds the anchors: Verbena Free Spirited in Hingetown — Molly Cheraso's fully alcohol-free cafe, bottle shop and dry bar, the first of its kind in the city — and The Sacred Vortex a mile west on Lorain Avenue, an alcohol-free teahouse and kombuchery in the old Platform Beer taproom that Cleveland Scene readers have voted the city's best alcohol-free bar two years running. Amba and Jukebox sit on the same few Hingetown blocks with printed zero-proof lists of their own. The second cluster is the Detroit Avenue strip in Lakewood, where Sacred Waters (Ohio's first kava bar), Humble Wine Bar's Phony Negroni, Crumb & Spigot's Sober Clover and LBM — running an intentional non-alcoholic cocktail programme since 2017 — sit within a few hundred metres of each other. The cocktail depth is real elsewhere too: Cordelia on East Fourth Street rebuilds its cocktails with Lyre's and Seedlip, Tremont's all-vegan Cloak & Dagger keeps several spirit-free drinks on every menu it prints, and Douglas Katz's Zhug in Cleveland Heights numbers its N/A cocktails alongside the full-proof ones. Kava is a bigger part of the picture here than in most US cities, and it is worth knowing that those rooms — Sacred Waters, Sacred Vortex and Willoughby's Kava Sol — also serve kratom and other psychoactive botanicals, which is a different proposition from a zero-proof bar. For a date, the venues below balance a real NA program with an atmosphere that actually works for talking to someone.

14 date-friendly venues