36 Below

You reach 36 Below through Sip Coffee & Beer Garage on Indian School Road — a daytime coffee shop and beer garden with a staircase at the back leading down to a candlelit room that shares neither its hours nor its mood. The speakeasy conceit is well worn in American bars by now, but the execution here is unusually complete: low light, close seating, a menu of drinks presented as compositions, and small plates built to be eaten in the dark. It sits a few doors from the Century Grand complex, making this short stretch of Arcadia Lite the densest concentration of serious cocktail work in Phoenix.

The non-alcoholic drinks get a named section rather than a footnote, and they are constructed rather than mixed. The menu rotates through immersive themes, and on the current Midnight in Paris list each of the five zero-proof drinks — all $14 — is an alcohol-free twin of one of the signature cocktails. The Kiwi's Nest Zero Proof works an NA kiwi cordial against taro-coconut milk and lime; the Château de Chambord swaps in an N/A spirit with tropical green tea, raspberry, lime, lemon perfume and rose water; the Epernay builds N/A gin with vanilla cordial, blueberry, lemon, N/A cardamom bitters and lemon-lime soda; Monet's Garden runs cantaloupe, honey, lemon and Free Brothers orange under a Jamaican lemon soda; and the Palais Garnier finishes basil, sage, honey and apple cordial with salt, cinnamon and a caramelized carrot foam. Earlier zero-proof compositions — the dessert-like Artemis, the oolong-and-peach Earth, Two of Cups, Enlightened, and Foam on the Rim — retired with the previous theme (a drink called Foam on the Rim survives on the current list only as a full-proof tequila cocktail). Mocktails also count toward the bar's multi-course Cocktail Experience packages, and the presentation remains the point as much as the flavour: these are drinks designed to look like the cocktails, which in a candlelit room where everyone is holding something ornate is more than an aesthetic consideration.

DiningOut Phoenix included the bar in its May 2026 guide to the best mocktails in the metro. Practicalities: it opens Tuesday to Sunday, from 4pm on weekdays and 3pm at weekends, closing at 1am on Friday and Saturday and earlier the rest of the week. The room is small, so weekend reservations are advisable, and the entrance through the coffee shop upstairs is easy to walk past entirely. It is a full cocktail bar, and the zero-proof menu is a genuine section of it rather than its identity.