Rosalie Italian Soul

Rosalie Italian Soul is chef Chris Cosentino's Italian-American restaurant, opened on 15 October 2019 inside Downtown Houston's C. Baldwin Hotel on Dallas Street. Cosentino is also known for Cockscomb in San Francisco and Jackrabbit in Portland. He closed Rosalie early in the pandemic and reopened it on 15 September 2021.

The same printed menu that carries the cocktail list has a standing zero-proof section labelled Mocktails, repeated further down as Rosalie Mocktails. Printing them on the same page as the cocktails, with full ingredients, is the detail that matters — it means ordering one requires no conversation with a server about what can be made.

All three published builds run on Ritual Zero Proof's spirit alternatives. The Ritual Margarita is the simplest, pairing the tequila alternative with fresh lime and agave. The Ritual Espresso Martini uses the rum alternative with cold brew or espresso and simple syrup — a sensible substitution, since an espresso martini's character comes far more from the coffee's bitterness and the shake's foam than from the vodka.

The Jungle Bird is the interesting one, and the most technically ambitious drink on any Houston hotel menu. The original is a 1970s tiki classic built on dark rum and Campari, and it is defined by that bitter red aperitivo cutting through pineapple — remove it and the drink collapses into fruit juice. Rosalie's version layers two different Ritual products, the Aperitif Alternative and the Rum Alternative, with pineapple juice, lime and simple syrup. Using two alcohol-free spirits in a single build is something very few bars bother with, and here it is the only way the drink works at all. A fourth mocktail, The Black Tie, appears on the menu without published ingredients.

The hours are unusual and worth reading carefully: Monday to Thursday the restaurant serves breakfast from half past six, then runs from eleven in the morning all the way to two in the morning. Friday and Saturday are dinner only, half past five to ten, and it is closed on Sunday. A downtown room serving properly built zero-proof cocktails at one in the morning midweek is a genuinely rare thing.