Anna's Place

Anna's Place is the kind of bar you have to be told about: a small, hidden room inside the Hotel Indigo on Dodge Street in downtown Omaha, run at the volume and intimacy of a cocktail party rather than a bar. It stays open until 1am from Tuesday through Saturday.

Its alcohol-free drinks are scratch-made specialty mocktails, and the house one is the Rowena Moore. The name is the detail worth noticing. Rowena Moore was an Omaha civil-rights organiser and community leader who campaigned for decades in North Omaha, and naming a drink for her puts it squarely in the bar's own house scheme — this is not a drink filed under "mocktails" at the bottom of a card, it is a drink with the same kind of name as everything else on the list.

That pattern recurs across this directory, and it is one of the most reliable signals available. Bars that name their alcohol-free drinks the way they name their cocktails have integrated them; bars that call them mocktails and number them have not. The naming is downstream of how the bar thinks about the customer.

Because the room is small and hidden, it also solves a specific problem for a non-drinker: the discomfort of a big, loud bar where the round is the organising principle. A twenty-seat room where the bartender knows what you are drinking is much easier to spend an evening in without alcohol than a crowded one.

This entry records the one named build. The wider specialty list is not published in a readable form, so nothing further is enumerated here.

Open 5pm to 1am Tuesday through Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday. It is a few blocks north-west of the Old Market cluster, near the downtown hotels.