Bolo

Bolo is chef Yun Fuentes's Latin American dining room and rum bar at 2025 Sansom Street in Rittenhouse, open since 2023. The bi-level room is vividly coloured, the cooking draws on Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican traditions, and it is named for the chef's grandfather, Juan "Bolo" Fuentes. Fuentes was a 2024 James Beard Awards semifinalist for Best Emerging Chef.

The bar's identity is rum — a deep roster of it — which makes the spirit-free list more notable, not less. Beverage director Tony Jimenez, a finalist in PUNCH's Best New Bartenders 2024, builds a genuine non-alcoholic menu alongside the rum programme rather than leaving non-drinkers with a soda.

The approach is to rebuild the house's own classics rather than invent unrelated fruit drinks. The No Jito uses Lyre's White Cane — an alcohol-free spirit made specifically to stand in for white rum — with lime, mint and soda, which is a mojito in every respect except the ethanol. Punch It goes to Lyre's Dark Cane, the aged-rum analogue, for something with more molasses depth. Building the zero-proof list from rum substitutes, in a bar whose entire premise is rum, means a non-drinker is ordering from the same idea as everyone else at the table instead of from a parallel menu.

There is a good culinary reason this works. Caribbean and Latin American drinking runs heavily to acid, sugar and aromatics — lime, cane, mint, tropical fruit — and those are the elements that survive the removal of alcohol most intact. A mojito depends far more on the interaction of lime, sugar and bruised mint than on the rum, which is why the alcohol-free version is genuinely close to the original rather than a distant approximation.

Open Wednesday and Thursday from five to ten, Friday and Saturday until midnight, and Sunday from four; closed Monday and Tuesday.