Nite Owl

Blackstone is the Farnam Street district west of downtown Omaha that has become the city's most concentrated food and drink strip, and Nite Owl is its late cocktail bar. Two drinks on its alcohol-free list are worth the trip on their own.

The Phony Negroni is the more obvious of them and the more useful. A negroni is bitter, red, stirred and served short — the archetypal aperitif — and it is the single hardest classic to replace without alcohol, because the bitterness that defines it normally comes from a fortified amaro. Building a convincing one requires either a proper non-alcoholic bitter aperitif or a lot of work with tea, gentian and citrus peel. That a bar bothers to make it, and names it honestly rather than dressing it up, is a reliable signal about the rest of the list.

The switchel is the more unusual. It is a colonial-era American farm drink of water, vinegar, ginger and a sweetener — molasses, honey or maple — that field workers drank in the heat long before soft drinks existed. It has real acidity, genuine ginger heat and no pretension to being a substitute for anything, which makes it one of the best possible answers to the question of what to drink for three hours in a bar. Its revival on cocktail menus is one of the more sensible things to happen to this category.

Omaha's local drinks coverage names both, which is the evidence behind this listing.

Nite Owl opens at 5pm Tuesday through Sunday and runs to midnight, 1am on Friday and Saturday, closed Monday. Blackstone is a short drive or a long walk from downtown; the strip around it means an evening here does not have to be a single stop either.