Fork & Barrel

Lower Frankfort Avenue — the Clifton end, closer to downtown than the Crescent Hill shops — has become one of the more interesting eating stretches in Louisville, and Fork & Barrel sits in the middle of it. The cooking is Southern, the venue is shared with the daytime operation Morning Fork, and the two run as a single kitchen and bar across different parts of the day, which is why the drinks list reads as broader than a dinner-only restaurant would manage.

The mocktail list is the reason it is here, and the spread is the point. A sweet pepper lemonade is a savoury-leaning long drink — pepper against citrus and sugar, which gives it somewhere to go other than sweet. Molly & Lucy's Punch is the shareable, fruit-forward option. Ain't Easy Being Green is the herbaceous one. Three drinks that sit in genuinely different places on the palate is more thought than most restaurant bars give the category, where the usual offer is one virgin mojito and a shrug. GoToLouisville, the city's official visitor bureau, named the venue in its round-up of where to drink alcohol-free in Louisville on that basis.

Two practical points. The hours are narrower than most of this guide — Tuesday to Saturday, 3pm to 9pm, closed Sunday and Monday — so it is an early-evening proposition rather than a late one, and worth checking before travelling. And a note on finding it online: the domain forkandbarrel.com is a parked listing offered for sale and is not the restaurant; the real site is bethefork.com. Volare is six blocks east along the same avenue and Pizza Lupo two blocks west, which makes this stretch of Clifton the densest run of alcohol-free-friendly dining outside Butchertown.