Dante

Caffe Dante has been on MacDougal Street since 1915, and in 2019 it was named the World's Best Bar at the World's 50 Best Bars — a remarkable thing for a Greenwich Village café that started life serving espresso to the neighbourhood. It is best known for two drinks programmes: the Negroni, which it treats as a family of variations rather than a single recipe, and the Garibaldi, the deceptively simple Campari-and-orange-juice build whose whole quality rests on how the juice is aerated. One point of navigation before you go, because it trips people up: three separate Dante rooms share a single website. This is the MacDougal Street original. Dante West Village sits on Hudson Street at the corner of Perry, and Dante Aperitivo is on Bank Street, and their menus are not the same.

We owe a correction on the non-alcoholic side. Our earlier entry described a dedicated zero-proof menu called "Temperance" headed by a signature "NOgroni". Neither name appears anywhere on Dante's site or on any of its current menus, and we could not trace either to a real source — so both have been removed rather than repeated. What actually exists is good, and sits under a plain heading, NON-ALCOHOLIC. There are five. The Espresso Shakerato at $16 shakes fresh espresso with orange juice and vanilla, which sounds unlikely and is the one to order — the orange lifts the coffee the way a citrus twist lifts a martini. The NA Cosmojito at $14 uses the house cranberry with fresh mint, pressed lime and orange bitters. The Dante Italian Spritz at $16 is built on Lyre's Italian Spritz with non-alcoholic sparkling wine and San Pellegrino. The NA Blood Orange Spritz at $17 is the most constructed, layering Seedlip Grove with raspberry syrup, balsamic vinegar and Aranciata Rossa. And the Forest Highball at $15 runs Everleaf Forest with clementine, saffron, citrus and orange bitters. Dante was shortlisted, not a winner, at NYC's Best Bars for NA 2025.