Never Say Dive

Never Say Dive sits on Broadview Road in Old Brooklyn, the largely residential south-west Cleveland neighbourhood that has slowly been gaining bars worth crossing town for, and the name is the joke: it looks like a dive and is emphatically not one. The kitchen runs rotating seasonal dishes and hands the room over to guest cooks regularly — the Cold Noodle Monday Vietnamese pop-up is the standing example — and the bar takes reservations through Resy and orders through Toast, which tells you how the place actually operates behind the shopfront.

The non-alcoholic drink is made the same way as the cocktails, which is the whole point of listing it. The house strawberry tonic, $9 in Cleveland Magazine's 2026 mocktail guide, is built from strawberry syrup with cinchona bark, fennel seed and basil — cinchona being the natural source of quinine, so the drink carries real tonic bitterness rather than sugar with soda splashed over it. The fennel and basil push it herbal and slightly savoury, and the result sits much closer to an aperitivo than to a strawberry soda, which is the reason it survives a whole evening. Four non-alcoholic beers are kept in the fridge for anyone who would rather hold a can, and the bar rotates what it stocks.

The practical case for Never Say Dive is that it is a genuine neighbourhood bar — open from 5pm, later at weekends, no dress code, no reservation needed for two people at the bar — that happens to make one very good zero-proof drink properly rather than treating the request as a nuisance. For a non-drinker looking for an ordinary night out rather than a destination, that combination is harder to find in Cleveland than a dedicated alcohol-free room is.