Darling Aviary

Darling Aviary is a rooftop bar on K Street in downtown Sacramento, a few doors from Dive Bar and within easy reach of most of the city centre. Visit Sacramento, the city's official destination organisation, names it among the venues serving mocktails, though it does not document the individual drinks — which is why the grade here is an honest 3 rather than higher.

The format is the reason it is worth including anyway. Rooftop bars are the least forgiving venue type for someone not drinking. There is no food to focus on, no game to play, no music loud enough to occupy attention; the whole experience is constructed around holding a cocktail while the light goes. Nowhere is the difference between your evening and everybody else's more visible, and nowhere is a glass of soda more conspicuous.

So a rooftop that turns up on a city's official mocktail list is doing something the format does not require of it. It suggests the bar has thought about the guest who is not drinking rather than assuming that guest simply will not come.

The hours are among the more useful in the guide: 4pm to 11pm early in the week, opening at 2pm on Friday and 11am at weekends, and running to 1:30am on Friday and Saturday. Late weekend service and a K Street location put it in the middle of downtown Sacramento's night, so it works as a late stop after dinner elsewhere.

Because the drinks are not publicly documented, it is worth asking what is available rather than arriving with expectations — and Dive Bar, with three named mocktails, is a short walk away as a fallback.

Worth adding that Sacramento summers reach well past a hundred degrees, which changes what a rooftop is for. Through July and August the appeal is the evening after the heat breaks, and cold non-alcoholic drinks are in genuinely high demand — alcohol dehydrates, and nobody sitting outside at ninety-five degrees is well served by a second negroni. Rooftop bars in hot cities tend to sell more zero-proof drinks than their menus suggest, and this is a good place to ask what the bartender can build.