Muskellounge & Sporting Club

The muskellunge is Wisconsin's state fish, a large and famously difficult predator that generations of anglers have failed to catch, and Muskellounge & Sporting Club builds its whole identity on that tradition — the sporting club being a genuine Upper Midwest institution, part bar and part fishing society. It sits on Monona Drive in Lake Edge, on the east side between Lake Monona and the Beltline, well outside the downtown cluster.

The non-alcoholic choice made here is a specific and intelligent one. Rather than building mocktails from scratch, the bar stocks St. Agrestis — the Brooklyn producer whose Phony Negroni is the most successful bottled non-alcoholic cocktail in the American market — and its companion Amaro Falso. What distinguishes both is bitterness. The Phony Negroni is genuinely bitter and lightly carbonated, built to be poured cold over ice with an orange twist, and it drinks like an apéritif rather than a soft drink; the Amaro Falso does the digestif end of the same idea. For a non-drinker, the thing most often missing from a bar's alcohol-free offer is bitterness — sugar is easy, bitterness is not — and a bar that solves it by stocking the right bottle rather than pretending to build it from scratch has made the honest call.

It is worth being plain that this is a full cocktail bar with a Wisconsin bar's atmosphere, not a quiet room, and the hours reflect it: 3pm to midnight Monday through Thursday, to 1am on Friday and Saturday, opening at 1pm Saturday and noon Sunday. It is about ten minutes' drive east of the Capitol and does not connect on foot to anything else in this guide, so treat it as its own destination — which, for a bittersweet drink in a room full of taxidermy and vintage lures, it comfortably is.