High Stakes Rooftop

The Tempo by Hilton on East Jefferson Street opened at the NuLu end of downtown and put High Stakes on its roof: an American grill with a hundred-plus bourbon list and a view across the Louisville skyline. Like every rooftop it trades partly on the view, and like every bourbon-forward Louisville bar it could easily have left non-drinkers with a lemonade.

What it did instead is worth noting as a model. Rather than buying a bottle of non-alcoholic spirit and calling the problem solved, the bar partnered with Elixir Kombucha and built a named list around fermented kombucha bases and house syrups. That produces drinks that taste like nothing else on the menu rather than like diminished versions of the cocktails: Treat for Max runs a caramel butter syrup, which is a dessert-adjacent direction almost no alcohol-free menu attempts; Fire & Ice is built on a lemon ginger tea syrup, so the heat is aromatic rather than spirituous; and the Collius uses a pineapple Szechuan syrup, where the Szechuan pepper supplies the tingling numbness that alcohol would otherwise contribute. Kombucha has trace alcohol from fermentation — typically under 0.5% ABV, the same threshold as non-alcoholic beer — which is worth knowing if your abstinence is strict.

Practically, the hours are tighter than the address suggests: Tuesday through Saturday from 4pm, closing at 10pm midweek and 11pm on Friday and Saturday, dark on Sunday and Monday. It is two blocks from bar Vetti on East Market, which has the city's best-constructed zero-proof negroni, so NuLu supports a full evening without a drink in it. Being a hotel rooftop, it also takes solo guests at the bar more comfortably than a destination restaurant would.