Little Mercies

Little Mercies is a small, multi-award-winning neighbourhood cocktail bar on Broadway Parade in Crouch End (N8), open since 2018. It was founded by Alan Sherwood together with brothers Max and Noel Venning — the team behind the acclaimed Three Sheets in Dalston and Soho — and it carries the same low-waste, precision-led ethos: Little Mercies has been named Sustainable Bar of the Year by the UK's Top 50 Cocktail Bars three times (2022, 2023 and 2025). It runs alongside a kitchen turning out playful seasonal small plates, so the room works equally as a date-night spot and a drop-in local.

The space is compact and unshowy — bare brick walls, accents of midnight blue, banquettes and a handful of bar stools — and fills with a bustling neighbourhood crowd, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. Prices are deliberately gentle for London: house cocktails land around £11, there's a 30%-off happy hour from 6pm to 7pm every day, and even "mini" drinks (such as a £6 lychee martini) for anyone easing in slowly.

Crucially, the bar treats its non-alcoholic drinks as a proper third section of the menu — house cocktails, classics and non-alcoholic — rather than an afterthought. The centrepiece is a house-made alcohol-free "gin", built by the bartenders as a sugar syrup engineered to do the job of gin without the booze: juniper and coriander seed oils, lemon, lemongrass and a few highly concentrated bitter infusions, with sugar and citric acid added for stability. That base anchors the low-and-no offering, turning up in a non-alcoholic gin and tonic and a non-alcoholic negroni built from Campari sugar, bitters, the boozeless gin and orange. The list is short, seasonal and keenly priced, and — as with everything here — made in-house rather than poured from a bottle, which is what sets it apart from most bars' token mocktail.