Amba

Amba sits on West 28th Street in Hingetown, the compact Ohio City block that also holds Verbena and Jukebox, and is the Indian-influenced restaurant in Douglas Katz and Todd Thompson's Edgewater Hospitality group — the same operation behind Zhug in Cleveland Heights. Chef Cameron McCaulley runs the kitchen, and the cooking works through spice, acid and fermentation rather than heat alone, which turns out to be the same logic driving the drinks list. Service is dinner only, Monday through Saturday, to 10pm on weeknights and 11pm at weekends.

The non-alcoholic section is a fixed part of the menu rather than a seasonal add-on, and each drink is written out with its ingredients exactly as the cocktails are. The Nimbu Masala is the house nimbu pani reworked as a bar drink: cumin, lemon, mint, black salt, ginger and soda water, where the black salt supplies a sulphurous savoury edge that stops it reading as lemonade — the single most common failure of a restaurant mocktail. The Blue Bergamot uses earl grey butterfly-flower tea with lemon and soda, and shifts colour in the glass as the acid hits the tea, which is a party trick that happens to also taste of something. The Spiced Nectar, at $13 and the drink Cleveland Magazine singled out in its 2026 guide, is built on a citrus-forward zero-proof spirit with cardamom agave, lime and a dried lime wheel, and is the closest thing on the list to a conventional cocktail.

On the beer side, Best Day Brewing's non-alcoholic kölsch is listed at $7 next to the full-strength taps rather than hidden in a footnote. Between Amba and Zhug, Edgewater is the most reliable group in the city for printed, named non-alcoholic drinks — useful when booking for a mixed table.