Ro Sham Beaux

Ro Sham Beaux is a Midtown bar on J Street and one of three Sacramento venues operated by the Irish Hospitality Group, alongside The Snug and The Butterscotch Den. All three carry the same non-alcoholic stock, and that consistency is the reason to know about any of them.

The Phony Negroni from St. Agrestis is the standout product. It is a bottled non-alcoholic frizzante built to replicate a Negroni — bitter, herbal, faintly sweet, served cold from the bottle — and it is widely regarded as one of the best ready-to-drink zero-proof products on the market. Its virtue in a bar setting is that it requires nothing of the bartender: no technique, no specialist ingredients, no risk of the drink being made badly by someone who has never made it before. You get the same drink every time. For a non-drinker, reliability is often worth more than ambition.

Guinness 0 covers the beer case, and it is genuinely good — closer to the original than most non-alcoholic beers manage, because Guinness's character comes from roasted barley rather than from alcohol.

The wider point is the group standardisation. Most of the labour of not drinking in a city is research: checking menus, guessing, arriving prepared for disappointment. When an operator stocks the same alcohol-free products across three bars, that work disappears — you can suggest any of them without looking anything up.

Ro Sham Beaux opens at 2pm most days and noon at weekends, running to midnight on Friday and Saturday. The Snug in Midtown and The Butterscotch Den on Broadway keep later hours still.

It is worth being straight about the ceiling here. Two stocked products and some non-alcoholic cocktails is a solid neighbourhood offering, not a programme — there is no bartender developing zero-proof specs, no house-made syrups, nothing like the tepache work at Juju or the Lyre's builds at Kupros. The grade reflects that. What it is instead is dependable, which for a bar you might end up in three times a month is arguably the more useful quality of the two.