M'tucci's Bar Roma

M'tucci's is a local Italian group with several rooms across Albuquerque, and Bar Roma is its Nob Hill outpost on Central Avenue — the old Route 66 strip that is still the city's best stretch for walking between places.

The reason it earns a place here is a technique rather than a drink: the bar makes its own shrubs, and the mocktails are built on them, with pineapple-rosemary and blueberry-raspberry both documented by Visit Albuquerque. A shrub is fruit preserved in sugar and vinegar, and it is the single most useful component in alcohol-free bartending. It delivers acidity with far more depth than citrus alone, it carries a savoury, almost fermented edge, and crucially it stops a drink from becoming sweet — which is the failure mode that makes most mocktails undrinkable by the second half of the glass.

They are also, almost always, made in-house. Nobody stocks a bought shrub, so a bar listing one is telling you it prepares its own drink components, which is the same signal this directory reads at Clio in Omaha and Wild Sage in Spokane.

The Italian setting adds something specific. The aperitivo — a bitter drink before dinner, with something to eat — is one of the few drinking rituals that translates cleanly without alcohol, because bitterness rather than strength is the point of it. A rosemary-and-pineapple shrub with soda does that job properly. For a non-drinker at an Italian table, having a genuine start to the meal rather than waiting for the food is most of the experience.

Open 11am to 10pm Monday through Thursday, to 11pm Friday and Saturday, and to 9pm on Sunday — seven days, all day, with no closed evening.