Blackbird

Blackbird has been on Market Street between Church and Sanchez since 2009, at the point where Upper Market runs into the Castro, and marked ten years of cocktails in 2019. It is a dark, art-hung neighbourhood bar rather than a destination cocktail room, and The Infatuation names it in its guide to the city's twenty best cocktail bars, saying it is where the writers go for nightcaps and after-work drinks. The bar opens at 5pm on weeknights, from 2pm at weekends, and trades until 2am on Friday and Saturday.

The drinks menu carries a heading for Low ABV & Zero Proof cocktails, and the distinction inside that section matters: three of the five drinks listed under it are genuinely low-alcohol builds using Aperol, Lillet, vermouth or rabarbaro amaro, while two contain no alcohol at all. Nearly February, at $10, is built from the bar's fig-infused balsamic with orange, grapefruit and soda water, and reads as a dry, faintly savoury long drink rather than a sweet one. Salty Puppy, at $12, is the more constructed of the two: Aplós Calm with grapefruit, lime, honey, orange blossom water and a salted rim, a zero-proof reading of the salty dog. Aplós Calm is a hemp-derived non-alcoholic spirit containing a broad-spectrum hemp extract, and Blackbird separately stocks Wyld CBD cans at $8, which is worth flagging for guests who are avoiding psychoactive ingredients as well as alcohol — the two truly neutral options on the list are Nearly February and the bar's soft drinks. Prices for the zero-proof drinks run well below the $12 to $15 charged for the full-proof cocktails. The rest of the bar is a straightforward neighbourhood operation — rotating draught beer and cans, a five-strong wine list, a boilermaker and well cocktails at $10 — and a 20 per cent service charge is added to unsettled tabs. For the Castro and Upper Market, where the drinking options are overwhelmingly built around late nights and full-strength cocktails, having two genuinely alcohol-free builds on the printed menu at a bar that trades to 2am is a meaningful piece of provision.