The Sick Stag

The Sick Stag is on 1st Street South in downtown Nampa, about twenty miles west of Boise in the Treasure Valley. Nampa is not a suburb in the commuter sense — it is a city of around a hundred thousand people with its own downtown — but it is almost entirely absent from the region's food and drink coverage, which concentrates on Boise's 8th Street and Grove Street blocks.

That is the argument for this listing. Two named alcohol-free drinks, a Sparkling Citrus Cooler and a Mock Mule, are a modest programme by the standards of Red Feather or Art Haus. But they are available to somebody in Nampa on a Tuesday evening who does not want to drive an hour round trip to sit in a Boise cocktail bar, and that accessibility is worth more than an extra ingredient.

The Mock Mule is the more reliable order of the two. A Moscow Mule is defined by ginger beer and lime, with the vodka contributing very little flavour, which makes it one of a small handful of classics that lose almost nothing in a zero-proof version. Ordering one is close to a guarantee rather than a gamble — useful in a venue whose drinks are not documented in detail.

Hours run 4pm to 11pm most days and to midnight on Friday and Saturday, closed Mondays. Craft Lounge is a few minutes away in the same town, which gives Nampa two options rather than one — a small thing, but the difference between somewhere to go and somewhere to go if it happens to be open. For anyone living at the western end of the valley, those two bars are effectively the whole local scene.