Front Street Cafe

Front Street Cafe sits on North Front Street in Fishtown, directly under the Market-Frankford El, and runs as an all-day room: coffee and breakfast from eight in the morning, a break in the afternoon, then dinner service into the evening. The building is large and plant-filled, with a garden, and the kitchen leans health-conscious without being humourless about it.

The drinks menu carries a printed "Zero Proof" heading, and what distinguishes this list from almost every other in Philadelphia is that all four drinks are spirit-based. Not fruit and soda with a garnish — actual alcohol-free spirits doing the structural work.

The Zero Proof Louie is the plainest: Ritual's gin alternative with honey and lime, which is a bee's knees without the gin. The Refresher takes the same base into a house ginger syrup with cranberry, ginger ale and fresh strawberries, and the double ginger — syrup and carbonated — gives it heat that carries.

The Buffalo is the drink worth travelling for, and it is genuinely unusual. It layers Ritual's whiskey alternative with pomegranate syrup and Seedlip Spice 94, which means two different alcohol-free spirits from two different producers in one glass. Almost no bar does this, because most treat a zero-proof bottle as a one-for-one swap and stop there. Spice 94 is built on allspice berry and cardamom with a long, bitter, bark-like finish, and layering it over a whiskey substitute produces the kind of depth that non-alcoholic drinks are usually accused of lacking.

The Mocha Espresso Martini rounds it out with Ritual tequila, espresso, house chocolate sauce and peppermint syrup — a dessert drink, and unashamed of it.

The practical note is the split service: the kitchen closes in the afternoon and reopens at five, running to ten on Friday and Saturday and nine the rest of the week, with the cafe side trading from eight in the morning. It is one of the few rooms in the city that works equally as a morning coffee and an evening out.