Delbar

Delbar — Farsi for heart, captured — opened in Inman Park in May 2020 at 870 Inman Village Parkway, from chef and owner Fares Kargar. Opening a restaurant in May 2020 was not a plan anyone would have chosen, and it has since become the anchor of a small Atlanta group: the Persian street-food stall Bibi at Ponce City Market, a second Delbar in Alpharetta, a Buckhead location in November 2024, and the French-Mediterranean Eden with its rooftop Garden of Eden at Star Metals in 2025. The Inman Park original is recognised in the MICHELIN Guide. The cooking is Persian and Middle Eastern, built on shared mezze, kebabs and family recipes.

Its non-alcoholic list is smaller than a dedicated cocktail bar's and more interesting than most, because it is not really a mocktail list at all. The Sharbat e Zereshk is a barberry and lime sharbat; the Iced Coconut Chai Tea is built on Persian tea with ginger and coconut.

Sharbat is worth understanding, because it reframes what is on offer. It is a Persian tradition of fruit, flower and herb syrups let down with water or ice, and it goes back centuries — a fully developed non-alcoholic drinks culture that existed long before the Western zero-proof category was invented, in a region where abstaining from alcohol was the norm rather than the exception. Barberry, the zereshk of the name, is intensely sour and slightly tannic, which is exactly the quality that makes a drink taste finished rather than sweet.

The practical consequence is that a non-drinker at Delbar is not being offered a substitute for something else. They are being offered the drink the food was built alongside. That is a rarer thing than a ten-item zero-proof menu, and for a long mezze dinner it works better than most of them.