Sandfish Sushi & Whiskey

Sandfish sits on 7th Avenue in the Melrose District, a stretch of central Phoenix that has spent the last decade turning from vintage shops and neon signs into one of the city's more interesting eating strips. The restaurant pairs a modern sushi menu with a whiskey programme — the two halves of the name — and opens daily at 4:30pm, which makes it an evening room rather than a lunch one.

Sushi restaurants are usually a poor bet for anyone not drinking. The default non-alcoholic offer is green tea or something sweet and fruity, neither of which works with raw fish: sugar flattens the delicacy the kitchen has spent its effort on. Sandfish avoids that by building its zero-proof drinks on Seedlip rather than syrup. The Virgin Garden is Seedlip Garden with lemon, muddled cucumber and soda — herbaceous, dry, closer in register to a dry sake or a crisp white than to a mocktail. The Nordic Brace is the more assertive of the two, setting Seedlip Garden against hibiscus and lemon with a jalapeno-ginger edge that stands up to soy and wasabi rather than being erased by them.

That is a small distinction that makes a large practical difference. A non-alcoholic drink built to accompany food, rather than to substitute for a cocktail, is rarer than it should be, and it is the reason this entry sits above the many restaurants in the metro that will make you something sweet on request. Two things to note: the whiskey list is the house identity and the bar is built around it, so this is emphatically not an alcohol-free venue; and with only a handful of named zero-proof options, the range is narrow even if the quality is not, so this is a place to eat well rather than to work through a list.