Easy Bistro & Bar

Easy Bistro has been one of Chattanooga's better restaurants for a long time — French-influenced cooking, an oyster programme, a MICHELIN Guide listing, and a move to the West Village on Chestnut Street that gave it a larger and better room. It sits in the same group as Main Street Meats and Little Coyote, which between them account for a substantial share of the serious cooking in the city.

The alcohol-free drink is called the Sober Sunset, which is a more honest name than most restaurants manage, and it is built on orange, grenadine, lemon and tonic water. That specification is worth reading carefully, because the tonic is doing the important work. Quinine gives the drink bitterness, and bitterness is what an alcohol-free drink usually lacks — it is the quality that makes a drink sippable across a two-hour dinner instead of cloying after half a glass. Grenadine and citrus supply sweetness and acid; the tonic keeps the whole thing dry enough to sit alongside food.

NOOGAtoday recorded the Sober Sunset in its guide to drinking without alcohol in Chattanooga, which is where this listing's evidence comes from.

This entry is graded three. There is one documented build, no printed zero-proof section on the published menu and no non-alcoholic spirits programme this directory could verify, so nothing further is claimed here. What a reader gets is a genuinely good restaurant where the drink they are handed has been thought about — which, at this level of dining, is not something to take for granted.

Service runs from 4pm every night, to 9pm Sunday through Thursday and 10pm on Friday and Saturday. Booking is advisable at weekends.