LBM

LBM sits on Madison Avenue in Birdtown, the small Lakewood district a few streets from Amazonia, and it has spent years being the bar Cleveland drinkers send people to when they want to explain what the city can do. Cleveland Scene's line remains the best summary: weird but good, definitely not for everyone, but earning a deep well of respect for having a personality, a point of view, and the nerve to carve out an eccentric niche. Co-owner Eric Ho, who co-founded the Cleveland chapter of the US Bartenders Guild, works with the kind of technique that would be at home in a much larger city — measuring out acids to the hundredth of a gram, milk-washing tea infusions to cut their astringency. The menus run in themed volumes rather than seasons, which is why the drink names change wholesale rather than one at a time. It opens at 4pm and runs to half past two in the morning on Friday and Saturday.

The non-alcoholic cocktails get their own printed heading, and there are three, each $10 — against full cocktails that cost considerably more, which is the ratio you want to see. Sacred Ashes is the most cocktail-like: tamarind and cardamom against chipotle, wildflower honey and rosewater, so it lands somewhere sour, smoky and floral all at once. Amethyst is built on chicha morada, the Peruvian purple corn drink, with pineapple, clove, cinnamon, apple and lime — a genuinely old, genuinely non-alcoholic tradition rather than a cocktail with the gin taken out, and the sort of choice that shows a bar has thought about what zero-proof drinking can be rather than what it lacks. Sigil is the autumn one, running cider and maple against chicory, chocolate, hazelnut and orange peel; chicory is the clever part, because its roasted bitterness does the job coffee or amaro would do in an alcoholic drink. On the beer list, Best Day's Electro Lime is $7 and a Lagunitas Hoppy Refresher $6. Because the menu turns over by volume rather than by season, treat these three names as current rather than permanent.