Group Therapy Pub & Playground

An old fashioned is the drink non-drinkers miss most, and it is the one that is hardest to fake. It is essentially neat spirit with sugar and bitters — there is nowhere to hide, no juice or soda to carry the flavour, nothing to do but taste like whiskey. Group Therapy's answer is to use a real product: Spiritless bourbon, a distilled non-alcoholic whiskey alternative, in a build it calls Not Your Grandpa's Old Fashioned.

That is a meaningful investment for a neighbourhood pub. A bottle of Spiritless sits on the back bar earning its keep only from customers who are not drinking, which is exactly why so few bars buy one. Stocking it is the clearest signal in this category that a room has thought about the problem rather than improvised around it.

The venue itself is on Falls Street in the West End, near Falls Park on the Reedy, and it is built as a pub with a playground and games rather than a straight drinking room. That format does the same work here as the board-game cafés and bowling alleys elsewhere in this directory: it gives an evening a structure that is not the round, which is the single most useful thing for someone who is not drinking, and it makes the venue workable for families as well as for groups.

The hours are the other argument. Eleven in the morning to ten at night Sunday through Thursday, and to 1am on Friday and Saturday — seven days a week with no closed day, in a city where most of the good cocktail rooms are dark on Sunday and Monday.

GVLtoday, Greenville's daily newsletter, named the drink in its round-up of thirty-plus craft mocktails across the city, which is the sourcing behind this entry.