NOMAD Melbourne

Rebecca and Al Yazbek brought NOMAD south from Sydney and put it under the Adelphi Hotel on Flinders Lane: a hundred seats on the lower ground floor, dark and low-ceilinged, with a wood-fired oven dominating the room and house-made cheese and charcuterie - duck mortadella, trout basturma - as the kitchen's signature. The cooking draws on Spain, Morocco and the Levant through Australian produce, and the wine list is a long, deliberately Australian document that runs to thirty pages.

The reason it is listed here sits on the back page of the separate bar menu, under a heading printed twice for emphasis: NON-ALC. Four cocktails follow, and none of them is a compromise. The fresh yuzu lemonade is Ito-Farm yuzu juice with cane sugar and soda, which is a real ingredient decision rather than a cordial. The Melon Cooler runs non-alcoholic gin with honeydew, cucumber, verjus and tonic. Picante is the interesting one - grapefruit, chilli, holy basil, rose and guindilla brine, so it lands savoury and hot rather than sweet, which is exactly what is usually missing from an alcohol-free list. Herb Garden is built on Lyre's Italian Orange with lemon myrtle verjus, honey, rosemary, chamomile and vanilla.

Beneath them, WINE, BEER & SPIRIT ALTERNATIVES covers the rest of an evening: NON #1 salted raspberry and chamomile, Heaps Normal 'Another' lager, Beesbucha banana honey kombucha, a Yumbo lemon iced tea soda, and both Four Pillars Bandwagon Dry gin and Bloody Bandwagon shiraz gin poured by the measure. The menu carries an allergen warning covering nuts, dairy, sesame and eggs, and states that no modifications are made to house cocktails - worth knowing before you ask. Lunch runs to 2.15pm and dinner from 5pm daily; a ten per cent surcharge applies on Sundays. It is a booking, not a walk-in bar, and the four non-alcoholic cocktails are the strongest reason for a non-drinker to take the reservation.