Gershwin's

Gershwin's sits on Granby Street, the spine of downtown Norfolk's restaurant and nightlife district, and works a classic cocktail-bar register. Its two documented alcohol-free drinks, both named by Visit Norfolk, are unusually revealing about how the bar thinks.

The Bohemian is a sour in full: alcohol-free gin, elderflower syrup, grapefruit juice, egg white and bitters. The egg white is the detail that matters. Foam requires a hard shake and adds a couple of minutes to the build, and most bars quietly skip it on a non-alcoholic order because they assume nobody will notice. Including it means the drink arrives with the texture and the presentation the alcoholic version would have — which, for someone who is not drinking, is most of the experience.

The Grand Illumination goes further. Non-alcoholic whiskey, smoked over cherry wood, finished with orange peel and bitters: this is the smoked-old-fashioned treatment, theatre included. Smoking a drink is pure performance — it occupies the bartender, it fills the room with cherry wood, and every part of it works identically whether or not there is alcohol underneath. A bar that will do this for a zero-proof order has decided the non-drinking customer gets the show too, and that is rarer than any ingredient on the list.

Both drinks lean on non-alcoholic base spirits rather than juice, which is the other marker of a serious programme — it means someone specified, bought and stocked products that only exist to serve people who are not drinking.

Hours are straightforward: closed Mondays, otherwise from 5pm, to 11pm midweek and midnight on Friday and Saturday. It is walkable from most of downtown Norfolk and sits a short ride from the Chelsea cluster. For a night out where one person is not drinking, the Granby Street stretch plus Chelsea covers almost everything the region has.