Colita

Colita is a Tex-Oaxacan restaurant from chef Daniel del Prado's DDP Restaurant Group — the team behind Martina and Bar La Grassa — open since October 2018 in a converted former gas station at 54th and Penn in the Armatage neighbourhood of southwest Minneapolis. It is named after del Prado's first dog. The kitchen runs Oaxacan-influenced barbecue, creative tacos and mole-driven dishes, and it is entirely gluten-free, which combined with the drinks list makes it an unusually easy restaurant to bring a group with different requirements to.

The drinks menu carries a dedicated Zero Proof section of four house-made non-alcoholic cocktails at $10 each, built with the same care as the alcoholic list: fruit-, herb- and tea-forward bases finished with carbonation. Rosas works rose against raspberry. Naranjitas combines citrus with lychee. The Horchata is a cinnamon coconut-milk build, which is the traditional partner for this food and considerably better than the version most restaurants pour from a carton. The 3leche Miele pairs honey with sarsaparilla — an old-fashioned root flavour that gives the list something bitter and adult at the end.

It is worth being straight about the scale of this programme relative to others in this directory. Four named drinks is a real, maintained list, not a token, and at a $10 price point they are properly made rather than marked up as a novelty. But it is a focused complement to a meal rather than a standalone bar menu — you would come here for the food and drink well alongside it, rather than come for the drinks themselves. For a neighbourhood restaurant in a residential corner of Minneapolis, that is exactly the right ambition, and it is more than most equivalent rooms manage. Dinner nightly, to 10pm on Friday and Saturday.