Fiorella (Inner Sunset)

Fiorella is a California-inflected Italian restaurant group founded in 2015 by Boris Nemchenok and Brandon Gillis, who opened the original on Clement Street in the Richmond District and have since expanded to four San Francisco neighbourhoods. The Inner Sunset branch at 1240 9th Avenue sits a block from Golden Gate Park and serves wood-fired pizzas, house pastas and seasonal Italian plates, with a heated rooftop that makes it usable in Sunset weather. The dining rooms are known for wallpaper printed with local landmarks and neighbourhood figures, a detail carried across every location. Service runs lunch Wednesday through Sunday and dinner nightly, and the room takes walk-ins more readily than most restaurants of its standard in the city.

What earns the Sunset location a listing is that its official cocktail menu carries named zero-proof drinks built on non-alcoholic aperitivos and amari rather than the usual retreat to lemonade and soda. The list includes the Noperol Spritz, which uses Giffard and Martini & Rossi non-alcoholic aperitivos topped with Good Twin dealcoholized sparkling wine; the Like a Virgin (prickly pear essence, lime, mint and sparkling water); the Harvest Moon (Pathfinder non-alcoholic amaro, lemon, honey and soda); an N/A Lucano Old Fashioned; and a Blackberry Cooler. The Noperol Spritz is the significant one, because an Italian restaurant that can serve a credible bitter spritz to a non-drinker solves the single most common ordering problem of the category — the aperitivo hour is the moment a table splits, and here it does not have to. The alcohol-free drinks sit on the same printed cocktail menu as the full-proof list, so ordering one requires no special request. Note that the non-alcoholic programme documented here is specific to this Inner Sunset location; the other Fiorella branches publish their own separate beverage menus and should not be assumed to match it. The rooftop is heated and the restaurant keeps a full lunch service Wednesday through Sunday, so the zero-proof list is available in the afternoon as well as at dinner.