Public Parking

East Johnson Street runs through Tenney-Lapham, a residential near-east neighbourhood that has quietly become one of Madison's better places to eat and drink, and Public Parking opened there in October 2024. Within a year it had a Bon Appétit Best New Bars listing for 2025 and a James Beard Best New Bar semifinalist nod for 2026, which for a bar in a city of a quarter of a million people is a substantial thing. The style is playful and precise at once: cocktail names that run to a full sentence, garnishes built rather than dropped in, glassware chosen for the joke, and drinks served in glasses chilled with nitrogen so they arrive genuinely cold.

For a non-drinker, a bar with that much critical attention is often the worst kind of room — the whole point is the spirits, and the alcohol-free option is a bought-in soda. Public Parking does not do that. Its standing zero-proof drink carries a name as long as anything on the main list — "I'm Just a Baby . . . I Can Pay You In Blocks" — and is built from smoked tea, lemon, ginger and bubbles, which is a genuinely bar-shaped construction: the smoke does the work an aged spirit would, the lemon and ginger supply acid and heat, and the carbonation gives it length. Naming it in the same register as the cocktails is not a small signal; it means the drink came out of the same development process rather than being added under protest.

Practicalities: it is open every day of the week from 4pm to 2am, which is the most generous schedule of any bar in this guide and useful when most of Madison's better zero-proof lists sit in restaurants that stop serving at nine or ten. It is small, and busy at weekends given the press attention, so early evening is the easier visit. Teasider's tea shop is a few doors along East Johnson, and Mint Mark is about a mile north-east on East Washington. There is a broader point here about how Madison's alcohol-free depth is distributed, and Public Parking illustrates it. The city has no dedicated sober bar, but it has an unusual concentration of ambitious bartenders working in small rooms — a Bon Appétit-listed cocktail bar on a residential street, a coffee-and-cocktail lounge using lapsang souchong for smoke, a golf simulator venue carrying eighteen zero-proof cocktails. What that produces is a scene where the quality of the alcohol-free drink is high but you are always drinking it in a bar. For a lot of people that is the ideal arrangement, and for some it is unworkable, and the honest version of a Madison guide has to say both.