Bar Tonique

Bar Tonique sits at 820 North Rampart Street on the edge of the French Quarter, and Where Y'at's description of walking in is the useful one: it takes you back to colonial New Orleans, with a beautiful brick interior that seems unchanged for two hundred years — and, the magazine adds, the prices will take you back as well. That combination is the whole proposition. This is a craft cocktail bar in a city full of them, but it is a neighbourhood one, priced for regulars rather than for Bourbon Street, and it opens daily from noon until 2am, which makes it useful at hours when very little else with this standard is serving. New Orleans Magazine noted early on what separates the drinks: fresh-squeezed juices as mixers rather than bottled ones, and most drinks sweetened with organic agave nectar in place of sugar. In a small, dim, brick room with fresh flowers along the bar top, that attention is what you are paying for.

For non-drinkers, the bar uses an older and rather better word than mocktail: temperance drinks. It is a nineteenth-century term from the temperance movement itself, and it fits a room styled after the same era — the drinks are built like cocktails, from the same fresh juice and agave the rest of the bar runs on, rather than being assembled from soda guns. Phosphates in particular belong to this tradition: a soda-fountain format built on acid phosphate, which gives a sweet drink a dry, mineral tartness that plain citrus cannot, and which has been quietly revived by exactly the kind of bar that takes its history seriously. Two practical caveats. The bar's menu is published as a file that cannot be read online, so the current temperance list and its prices have to be seen in person. And its website redirects to a single-page Adobe Express site — that is genuinely its own current page rather than an abandoned one, but it carries little beyond hours and an address.