Billy Sunday

Billy Sunday has occupied 3143 W Logan Boulevard since 2013, part of chef Matthias Merges's Folkart Management group, and it is best known for a bar back that reads more like an archive than a stock list — one of North America's deepest collections of vintage fernet and amaro, much of it bottled decades ago and no longer made. The room is named after the baseball player turned evangelist who campaigned for Prohibition, which tells you the register: the bar takes its own seriousness lightly. Food is built for drinking rather than dining, running French onion dip with kettle chips at $6, pork chicharrones with a barbecue spice blend and hot sauce at $9, a five-cheese plate with Publican Quality bread at $28, and mussels in escabeche with a mezcal-amaro mustard at $28. It keeps genuinely late hours for the neighbourhood, opening at 5pm and running to 2am on Friday and Saturday, with a noon start on Sundays.

The non-alcoholic drinks sit under a heading of their own, "Spirit Free", and the two built cocktails are made with the same fermented-and-infused thinking as the amaro list rather than being fruit and soda. The Lupine Lady ($12) is the more complex: verjus infused with lavender and thyme, lengthened with lime, mint, basil and sparkling water, so it lands dry and herbal where most zero-proof drinks land sweet. The Italian Cream Soda ($9) goes the other way — a cola reduction with stewed cherries, cream and nutmeg over Perrier. Athletic Brewing supplies a rotating non-alcoholic beer at $7, which the menu tells you to ask the bartender about rather than pinning to one label. One detail deserves flagging, and to the bar's credit it flags it itself: the house fermented sodas ($8, in flavours including Dr. Billy, sasparilla, watermelon and a mystery option) carry a printed warning that they contain trace amounts of alcohol, a by-product of fermentation. Anyone avoiding alcohol completely should order the Lupine Lady, the Italian Cream Soda or the Athletic instead — but a bar that discloses this unprompted is being more honest than most.