Double Zero

Double Zero is a neighbourhood Italian restaurant at 1577 North Decatur Road in Emory Village, owned by Fredrico Castellucci III with John Castellucci as culinary director, part of the Atlanta-based Castellucci hospitality group. The kitchen is built around Neapolitan-style wood-fired pizza made with an heirloom yeast starter and the double-zero flour that gives the restaurant its name, alongside handmade pasta and shareable southern Italian dishes. The room is casual and family-friendly, with shuffleboard and foosball.

The bar keeps a named zero proof cocktails section rather than leaving non-drinkers to the soft drinks, and the three drinks on it are more considered than the count suggests. The Bermuda Triangle combines rosemary, orange and lime with brine and soda. So Fresh So Clean runs turmeric against lime and pomegranate. Orange is the New Black is orange and lemon juice with fresh ginger and club soda. Resy noted in 2024 that the restaurant offers three non-alcoholic cocktails to accompany its southern Italian cooking.

The brine in the Bermuda Triangle is the detail worth pulling out. A few drops of salt solution in a drink suppresses bitterness and amplifies aroma, which is why it turns up in serious cocktail bars — and in a zero-proof drink it does more work still, because there is no alcohol to carry the aromatics or give the drink weight on the palate. A bar that reaches for saline rather than more sugar is one that has thought about why non-alcoholic drinks usually fall flat.

Rosemary, turmeric and fresh ginger across three drinks is a herb-and-spice list rather than a fruit-juice one, which is what makes them work next to a wood-fired pizza. The restaurant serves Monday to Thursday from 5pm to 9pm and until 10pm on Friday and Saturday, and is closed Sunday.