Mr West Bar & Bottle Shop

Mr West opened on Footscray's bustling Nicholson Street Mall in 2017 and quickly became a cornerstone of Melbourne's inner west. It's a two-storey operation: a bottle shop and casual bar rolled into one, deliberately down to earth and, in Broadsheet's words, "nerdy and obsessive about drinks." Local students and families take the picnic tables out front, there are comfy booth seats inside, and an upstairs courtyard that catches the good afternoon sun.

The main draw is a set of 24 taps pouring beer, cider, wine and cocktails, backed by a shop floor deep in natural wine, wild-fermented and Belgian-style beer, and obscure mezcal. Crucially for a non-drinker, that same obsessive curation extends to the zero-proof shelf: the bottle shop carries a real alcohol-free range spanning AF beer, AF red, white and sparkling wine, and adult non-alcoholic spirits, so this is a genuine suburban bottle shop where you can walk in and buy zero-proof to take home.

Specific non-alcoholic stock has included Garage Project's Tiny non-alc Stout and non-alc IPA and Dr Lo non-alcoholic sparkling, while the bar upstairs mixes house-made non-alcoholic drinks alongside its cocktail list. NoLo Life, the Australian no/low directory, lists Mr West with a GOOD range of AF and LA drinks and a NoLo rating of 4.

Food stays casual and BYO-friendly, with cheese boards, charcuterie and ploughman's platters, and staff happy for you to bring in banh mi, Indian or African food from the surrounding streets. It's the kind of unpretentious neighbourhood room where ordering an alcohol-free beer or a house NA drink raises no eyebrows.

The bar-plus-bottle-shop format is the reason this one works so well for non-drinkers. Pub With No Booze describes Mr West as the bar everyone in Footscray wishes were their local, run by Caleb and Josh — two operators it calls passionate hospitality young guns, always looking out for exciting new products — and notes, as an aside that says more than the rest, that Mr West sold the guide its own first non-alcoholic beer. With a comprehensive bottle shop downstairs, the guide reckons all your non-alcoholic needs are covered.

That structure matters practically. A venue with retail underneath turns over stock far faster than a bar alone, which means the alcohol-free range is current rather than a dusty shelf of whatever was bought in two years ago, and it means you can drink something in the room and then take it home. For anyone building a non-alcoholic repertoire rather than getting through a single evening, that is a more useful thing than another cocktail list.