Le Loup

Le Loup occupies the floor above The Optimist at 1400 Adams Street in Germantown, part of Ford Fry's Rocket Farm Restaurants group, and it opened in early 2022 as a deliberately vintage-feeling counterpoint to the seafood restaurant beneath it. The cocktail programme belongs to Kenneth Vanhooser, a Nashville native who spent a decade in New York before coming back for this job — they always had me in mind for Le Loup, he told Nashville Lifestyles, so we bought a house almost sight-unseen and moved down. The room is the reason many people come: deep green marble runs through it, the colours are saturated and low-lit, and a custom underwater mural by the artist Rebecca Green wraps the space, producing what The Infatuation described as the distinct feeling that you are submerged in a submarine. Food is designed for grazing alongside drinks rather than for a full sit-down dinner — bluefin tuna big belly with olive oil and crunchy salt, West Coast uni on a brioche soldier, smoked fish dip with trout roe and Ritz crackers, a butter-based smash burger, and bananas Foster over house vanilla bean ice cream.

The non-alcoholic offering is printed under its own heading, "Zero Proof", and it is honest to say up front that it is short: two made-to-order drinks, each $8, roughly half the price of the bar's full cocktails. Lift to the Scaffold is served on the rocks and built from lemon, mint, cucumber, alfalfa and tonic — herbal and dry rather than sweet. Four arrives in a coupe and works grapefruit with calpico, pineapple, ginger and chili, which gives it the lactic tang and heat that a fruit mocktail usually lacks. Athletic's Atletica zero-alcohol beer is $6 on the beer list. Two drinks is a genuinely small list for a bar of this ambition, and the roster rotates, so anything named in an older article should be checked rather than ordered from memory. What the section does get right is placement and price: it sits inside the cocktail menu, made to order by the same bartenders, rather than being relegated to the soft drinks. Open from 5pm Thursday through Sunday, to 1am on Friday and Saturday.