Saint Eve's

Saint Eve's is a small, intimate cocktail bar on 12th Street in Park Slope, and its size is the whole character of the place: it takes no reservations, and it is deliberately tiny, which makes it the opposite of a destination and rather good as a place to sit and talk. It opens at 5pm and runs to close, with happy hour from 5 to 7 Monday to Thursday. It was shortlisted at NYC's Best Bars for NA 2025 — the awards run a flat winners tier plus a shortlist, so shortlisted is the accurate word.

The non-alcoholic drinks sit under a heading printed, like everything else on the menu, in lower case: spirit free. There are three, all $13, and what distinguishes them is that each is built on a genuinely different base rather than three variations on one bottle. Days of future past uses Pathfinder with Giffard's non-alcoholic ginger liqueur, grapefruit, lime and a splash of soda — the ginger liqueur is the part most bars skip, and it gives the drink a heat and length that plain ginger beer does not. Don't call me shirley shaken is the joke on the list and the most constructed drink on it: green-tea-infused Seedlip Grove 42 with strawberry, Giffard's non-alcoholic aperitivo and lime, shaken rather than built, so it arrives with the texture a Shirley Temple never has. Alter ego runs a spicy-infused Seedlip Garden 108 with cucumber, mint, lemon and tonic, which is the long one to nurse. Between them they cover bitter, sour and fresh, which is about as complete as a three-drink list can be. One practical caution: the bar's own website gives two slightly different street numbers on different pages, 471 and 475 12th Street, with the second appearing next to a reference to sister restaurants — every other page uses 471, which is the address to go by, but it is worth confirming before travelling.