CBD Provisions

CBD Provisions occupies the Main Street frontage of The Joule and has been one of downtown Dallas's more reliable restaurants for a decade, a Texas brasserie in a hotel that takes its art collection as seriously as its cooking. Its non-alcoholic drinks arrive under a printed Mocktails heading, and the choice of base spirits tells you the bar has thought about the category properly rather than reaching for the fruit juice.

Two of the three are built on Almave, the non-alcoholic blue agave distillate developed with Lewis Hamilton — a product designed to behave like blanco tequila rather than to taste of nothing, and one still uncommon on Dallas back bars. The Agave Maria pairs its reposado expression with lime and passion fruit; the Green Jardin takes the blanco into cucumber, jalapeño and agave, which is the closest a zero-proof drink gets to a spicy margarita in this city, and the one to order if what you miss is heat rather than sweetness. The third, Café de Olla Frío, uses Lyre's espresso-malt spirit with espresso, charred orange and piloncillo, echoing the Mexican spiced coffee it is named for; it is a genuine after-dinner drink, which is the slot zero-proof lists most often leave empty.

What makes the list useful in practice is where it sits. This is a full-service restaurant serving breakfast through dinner seven days, in a hotel, on a downtown block where much of the competition closes between services. That means the mocktails work at a business breakfast, a weekend brunch and a late dinner alike — three occasions where ordering a soft drink usually marks you out, and where being handed something built on a real distillate does not. The room never signals that a guest who is not drinking has ordered the lesser thing, which in a hotel brasserie of this class is the whole point. Almave is worth knowing by name if you are ordering zero-proof around Dallas, because it is the variable that separates a spicy-margarita substitute that works from one that tastes of cordial. Very few bars in this guide stock it, and the two drinks built on it here are the strongest agave-led non-alcoholic pours we have recorded in the city.