Cure

Cure opened in 2009 in a restored firehouse on Freret Street, at a point when that stretch of Uptown was still storm-damaged and largely empty, and it is credited with starting both the city's modern cocktail movement and the neighbourhood revival that followed it. It won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Program in 2018, and Where Y'at noted that its excellence continues to shine as it secures a place on North America's 50 Best Bars for the third consecutive year — most recently at number 21. It opens at 4pm Sunday through Thursday and 3pm on Friday and Saturday, and takes dinner reservations for parties up to ten.

What matters here for a non-drinker is structural, and it is the thing most bars get wrong. Cure's zero-proof drinks are not on a separate card or a laminated afterthought — they are printed as a section headed Zero Proof on the same menu as Cocktails We Love, which is where the bar puts its own favourites. Four are on it now. Gulfside is $12, built on cucumber, mint, lime and agave with Fee's peach bitters, and is the easy one to drink for an evening. Round of Applause is the most expensive at $15 and the most cocktail-like, using The Pathfinder Bitter with Q tonic, lemon, strawberry and mint. Needlepoint Sour at $13 is a real sour with egg white, using verjus and grapefruit against ginger syrup and honey — a genuine texture that fruit and soda cannot fake. Second Opinion at $12 leans bitter and aromatic, with Giffard Apéritif Bitter, chai tea, verjus and rose water. Two of the four are built on verjus, the pressed juice of unripe grapes, which is the most useful acid in zero-proof bartending because it brings wine's tartness without wine's sugar. The list rotates genuinely rather than nominally, so drinks documented here in past seasons — The Tide Is High, The Eureka — have already been retired. Expect the names to have moved on; expect the standard not to have.