Persephone

Persephone opened in January 2022 next door to La Medusa, the gently Sicilian trattoria that has anchored Columbia City for decades, and it belongs to the same owner, Meredith Molli. Calling it a bar undersells the shape of the thing: it is a bar, a specialty grocer and a café at once, and sometimes it cosplays as a mini farmers market. You can buy local vegetables and fruit, olive oil and fresh pasta, or sit down and order lunch, dinner, drinks and snacks straight through from noon. The Infatuation's description is the one that gets the feel right — effortlessly cosy, decorated with string lights, a lot of happy green plants, and wacky labels from shelves of natural wine bottles. The food is fried and excellent: an all-star lineup of crispy fish meatballs, saffron arancini, and a chickpea panelle sandwich with mayo and lemon on a toasted sesame roll. It opens Wednesday to Saturday from noon.

What makes it interesting for a non-drinker is the bar's whole orientation. Persephone is built around amaro — the bitter Italian herbal liqueurs — with a huge chalkboard selection of them, and the house move is a bitter red spritz. Bitterness is the hardest thing to replace when you stop drinking, because most non-alcoholic substitutes reach for sugar and fruit instead, and a room that already thinks in amari has both the palate and the glassware to build you something with a proper bitter spine. The bar keeps non-alcoholic stock specifically so that non-drinkers can get a similarly nuanced experience. Two honest limitations. Persephone has no website at all, which is why some listings wrongly report it closed — it is not; La Medusa's own site publishes its current hours, and we confirmed those there. And because there is no site, we could not establish which non-alcoholic amari, aperitifs or wines it actually pours, which is exactly the detail that would matter most here. Ask at the bar, and ask specifically for something bitter — that is what this place is for.