Anise

Anise is a pan-Mediterranean food and wine bar that opened in September 2021 inside the Drey Hotel, the boutique hotel at the centre of The Village, a large redeveloped residential community in central and north-east Dallas. The kitchen works along the Mediterranean coast rather than from one country, running mezze and shareable plates, and the wine list is the reason most people come — roughly thirty wines by the glass, ten of them on tap, and about 135 bottles in total. The room opens onto two outdoor spaces that are the better places to sit in spring and autumn: an umbrella-shaded front patio seating 42, and a quieter back terrace seating 26. Dinner runs Tuesday to Saturday from 5pm to 10pm, and the space has hosted guest residencies, including a Kyo omakase pop-up.

The non-alcoholic offering here is genuine but small, and it is worth being precise about its size before making a special trip. Anise publishes a named "Zero Proof" section, but it holds one house-built drink: the Underserved ($8), made with sweet plum, ginger and lemon, lengthened with Fever-Tree Mediterranean tonic. Beside it sit a fresh ginger ale ($4) and a Heineken 0.0 ($6). The Dallas Observer picked exactly that drink out when it surveyed the city's mocktails in January 2024, describing the Underserved as sweet plum, ginger and zesty lemon all harmonised by Fever-Tree Mediterranean tonic. What Anise offers a non-drinker, then, is less a zero-proof cocktail list than a wine bar that has thought about one drink properly and serves it in a room where not drinking does not feel conspicuous — a reasonable choice for a dinner where the rest of the table is working through the by-the-glass list, and a thin one if the drinks themselves are the point of the evening. The published drinks menu has not been refreshed recently, so it is worth asking what the bar is pouring on the night.