Sidebar at Surdyk's

Surdyk's has traded at 303 East Hennepin Avenue since the 1930s and is one of the reference points of Northeast Minneapolis: a liquor store, a cheese counter and a deli under one roof. Sidebar opened in September 2020 in the back corner of the building, a sixty-seat room with a thirty-four-seat patio, with Randall Prudden — previously at Spoon and Stable, and at Alinea and Next in Chicago — in the kitchen. Its defining trick is that any bottle from the shop can be carried in and opened for an $8 corkage fee, which makes it one of the better wine rooms in the city. That context is worth stating plainly, because it is an alcohol-forward business: this is a bar attached to a liquor store, not an alcohol-free space.

What lifts it onto this list is that the zero-proof section is designed rather than tolerated. Two of the four non-alcoholic cocktails are house builds at $7, cheaper than the full-strength list rather than priced as a novelty: The Purple One works a blueberry-poblano shrub against ginger, lime and grapefruit, using the poblano for a low green heat that keeps it from reading as fruit punch; Mango Is Life is a citrus-forward build on mango, orange, lemon and grapefruit. Above them sit two drinks using non-alcoholic products — the Strawberry Spark at $12, built on Three Spirit's Livener with strawberry shrub, lime and orange and carrying caffeine, and a $9 pour of St. Agrestis Phony Negroni. The packaged list is unusually broad for a restaurant bar and reflects the shop's buying: Leitz Zero Point Five pinot noir in cans, Woody's non-alcoholic sparkling rose, Proxies crisp dry cider, and Best Day Brewing's hazy IPA. Service runs evenings Tuesday through Thursday, all day Friday and Saturday, and a short Sunday brunch. For a non-drinker the useful detail is the price ladder: the two house zero-proof builds sit at $7, below the packaged non-alcoholic beers and well below the full-strength cocktails, which is an unusual direction for a bar to take and makes an evening here cheap rather than penalising. The room is small, so booking ahead is sensible at weekends.