Butter Bar & Kitchen

Almost everything in this city guide is downtown or in the South End. Butter Bar & Kitchen is neither: it sits in a shopping plaza on North Avenue in the New North End, the residential half of Burlington above the hill, and it serves the neighbourhood rather than the visitor. That is exactly why it is worth recording — a non-drinker who lives up here should not have to drive into town for a decent drink.

The restaurant is a gastropub in the straightforward sense: burgers, fried chicken, salads, a kids' menu, cocktails made with Vermont distillers' spirits and a local beer list. Weekend brunch runs from 9am with breakfast classics, espresso drinks and baked goods, which makes it one of the few daytime rooms in this guide.

The alcohol-free evidence is a formatting detail that turns out to be a reliable signal. Butter's own ordering menu lists Mocktails as a category, printed alongside Specialty Cocktails and Beverages rather than dropped in among the sodas. Kitchens that do not actually make alcohol-free drinks do not create a menu category for them; the ones that do almost always have a bartender who cares. The specific drinks are not published in a form that could be read for this listing, so none are recorded here and the entry is graded three rather than four.

The hours need watching. Butter is closed Monday and Tuesday entirely, opens at 4:30pm Wednesday through Sunday, and closes early by bar standards — 8:30pm midweek, 9pm on Friday and Saturday, 8pm on Sunday. Brunch service runs 9am to 2pm on Saturday and Sunday. Plan around it rather than turning up late.