High & Dry

High & Dry opened in 2024 at 899 Broadway in Bushwick, on the Bed-Stuy border, tucked beneath the elevated J/M/Z tracks near Myrtle Avenue — a location that is pure Brooklyn in a way a polished Manhattan sober bar could never be. It is fully alcohol-free, and the name is the concept: the caffeine drinks get you high, the no-alcohol policy keeps it dry. The founding team is an unusual mix that says something about who builds these places — Tobly McSmith, a young-adult novelist for HarperCollins; Garret Peterson, a former Coney Island paramedic; Breandan Carroll; and Daniel Stettner, a graphic designer who handles the branding — several of whom have worked across other New York sober spaces.

It runs from midday to midnight every day of the week, which is the detail that makes it work. A bar that closes at 6pm is a café; one open until midnight is somewhere you can actually spend an evening. The pitch is a third space for creatives, remote workers and night owls who want bar-style socialising without alcohol, and the format serves all three across a single day. The menu spans spirit-free cocktails, coffee and espresso, matcha, tea and rotating kombucha on tap, with most drinks priced under $8 — genuinely important, because a great many alcohol-free bars price their drinks at cocktail rates and quietly exclude the people most likely to need them. Named builds include a New York Egg Cream, a Butterfly Pea Lemonade and a Laura Palmer.

Co-owner Garret Peterson's description of what happens when people walk in is the best short account of why rooms like this matter: "People come in, and they're shocked that people are in here having fun without alcohol, and it makes me very happy to see that." The surprise is the point — most people have simply never seen it.