Gates & Brovi

Monroe Street runs south-west from the University of Wisconsin campus through Dudgeon-Monroe, and is one of the few Madison neighbourhoods outside the isthmus with a proper commercial street — bakeries, a wine shop, a handful of restaurants, all walkable from the houses around them. Gates & Brovi sits at 3502, doing American cooking with a full bar, and functions as the neighbourhood's dining room.

Its non-alcoholic list is the least fashionable in this guide and one of the more useful. There is no smoked tea, no adaptogen and no drink with a paragraph-long name. There is an NA paloma, an NA margarita, an NA gin and tonic and a virgin bloody mary, all recorded in BRAVA Magazine's survey of Madison mocktails. Those four cover the overwhelming majority of what someone who has stopped drinking actually wants to order in a restaurant: the drink they used to have. The bloody mary deserves particular note in Wisconsin, where the garnish arms race is a genuine regional tradition and where a virgin version is a completely normal order rather than an apologetic one — which is exactly the social ease a non-drinker is looking for.

Practically, the weekend hours are the draw: 9am on both Saturday and Sunday, which makes it a brunch option in a guide heavy with evening venues, running through to 10pm on Saturday. Weekdays it is dinner only, from 4pm. The location puts it away from the Capitol Square cluster and on the same side of town as Leopold's Books Bar Caffe in Greenbush, about ten minutes east along Regent Street, and Hilldale with Cafe Hollander a similar distance north — so a west-side day without drinking is easy enough to assemble around it.