Dear Daphni

Dear Daphni occupies the ground floor of The Laurel on South 20th Street, a block off Rittenhouse Square, cooking a modern Greek menu — mezze, whole grilled fish, a wood fire. It opens at four in the afternoon and runs to ten most nights, eleven on Friday and Saturday.

The non-alcoholic drinks are worth attention because they are built from the restaurant's own pantry rather than from the generic sweet-and-sour rail that most kitchens use for this category. The Honey Bee pairs a non-alcoholic gin with sumac honey, lemon and Pinamor, and sumac is the ingredient doing the interesting work. It is the dried and ground berry of the sumac shrub, deep red, and it carries a sharp, almost fruity sourness that runs through Greek, Turkish and Levantine cooking wherever a cook wants acidity with body rather than the thin brightness of a lemon. Infused into honey and set against a juniper-led alcohol-free spirit, it produces something genuinely difficult to describe by reference to any standard cocktail — which is the highest compliment available to a zero-proof drink, since most of them are defined by what they are imitating.

The second build runs a non-alcoholic rum with pineapple, lime and Persian cucumber. Persian cucumbers are thin-skinned, seedless and markedly less watery than the standard variety, so they contribute flavour rather than dilution — the reason they turn up in Mediterranean salads and, here, in a glass.

The wider case for a Greek restaurant as a night out without alcohol is the way the food is served. A mezze table arrives in waves and is shared, which means the evening's rhythm is set by dishes landing rather than by rounds being bought, and the meal has natural pauses built into it. Add drinks constructed from the same spice shelf as the cooking, and ordering alcohol-free stops being a substitution and becomes part of the same meal.