Bijou

Browne's Addition is the oldest residential neighbourhood in Spokane, a grid of Victorian and Craftsman houses just west of downtown, and Bijou is its cocktail bar. The menu is broader than most — house specialties, classic favourites, a run of warm wintry drinks for the months when that matters in eastern Washington, seasonal coffee blends, and mocktails carried as a standing part of the list rather than as an appendix.

What lifts it into this guide is how the alcohol-free drinks are actually made. The bar works from its own pantry: butterfly pea flower tea, house-made elderflower and lavender syrups, fresh lemon juice, soda water, a lemon peel garnish treated as seriously as it would be on a gin drink. Butterfly pea flower is a deliberate choice as well as a pretty one — it shifts from blue to violet as acid hits it, so the drink performs at the table the way a good cocktail does, which is a large part of what a non-drinker is actually missing in a bar.

The service model is the other half of it. Rather than handing over a short fixed list, the bartenders ask what you like and what you do not — sweet, sour, bitter, herbal — and build from there. That is normally a warning sign in this directory, because "we'll make you something" is how bars with no programme deflect the question. Here it sits on top of a printed mocktail section and a documented house-syrup pantry, so it functions as an upgrade rather than a substitute for having thought about it.

Bijou is open seven days from 3pm, running to midnight and to 1am on Friday. In a city where several of the best alcohol-free lists are Thursday-to-Saturday operations, being open on a Monday is a real advantage.