Honey Road

Honey Road opened on the Church Street Marketplace and has spent the years since collecting James Beard recognition and a reputation that reaches well outside Vermont. It is a women-owned-and-operated mezze restaurant — Eastern Mediterranean small plates, wood fire, a lot of dishes on a small table — and it is the reservation most visitors to Burlington try to get first.

The bar is built with the same specificity as the kitchen. The cocktail list runs to things like a barberry caipirinha and a turmeric-and-ginger gin drink, flavours drawn from the same pantry as the food, and the menu carries an N/A Beverage section as a standing part of the list. Just as usefully, the staff are set up to suggest low-alcohol or spirit-free counterparts to the printed cocktails, which for a restaurant with this much flavour-led bartending is a more valuable offer than a fixed pair of mocktails would be — the interesting ingredients are the syrups, brines and infusions, and those do not need the spirit to work.

Hotel Vermont's guide to drinking in Burlington, which is written by people who send guests out to other bars all night, lists Honey Road among the places with several non-alcoholic options. That is a peer recommendation rather than a marketing claim.

This entry is graded three rather than four, and the reason is documentation rather than doubt: the N/A section exists, but the restaurant does not publish its drink list online in a form that could be read for this guide, so no signature drinks are recorded and the strength of the section could not be measured. Ask at the bar — this is a room where asking gets a good answer.

Dinner is served 4pm to 9pm every day of the week, and walk-in seats at the bar are usually the realistic way in.