Daydreamer

Daydreamer is a cocktail and champagne bar on East 6th Street, next door to Suerte, and a collaboration between veterans of Kitty Cohen's, Frazier's and The White Horse. The concept is caviar, champagne and martinis, stated about that plainly. The interior is small and softly lit, the back patio has a swimming pool, and a taco truck runs out the back.

The martini programme is the reason people go, and it is also the reason a non-drinker should know what they are walking into. A martini bar is a difficult room in which not to drink: the whole format is built on one very cold, very strong, very simple drink, and there is no fruit or bubbles to hide behind in a zero-proof version of it. Bartenders here do accommodate zero-proof requests and reviewers say so consistently, but there is no published list of named non-alcoholic drinks — you are asking rather than ordering.

If you do ask, the useful move is to describe a texture rather than a drink. A martini's appeal is temperature, dilution and a clean saline finish rather than the gin itself, and a bar with this much attention to that particular drink can usually build something dry, cold and savoury if told that is what you want. Asking for a mocktail tends to produce something sweet; asking for something bracing and savoury tends not to.

The hours are unusually generous — 3pm to 2am Monday to Friday and from noon at weekends — and the pool patio and taco truck make it as viable in daylight as at midnight. That flexibility is worth something. An afternoon on a patio by a pool is a much easier proposition without a drink than a 1am room built around martinis, and this is the same venue either way.