Sneaky Pickle

Sneaky Pickle is at 3200 Burgundy Street in the Bywater — worth confirming, because published guides still print two older St Claude Avenue addresses for it. Ben Tabor opened the original in 2014 and has been blunt about what he was doing: he used to say it was where vegetarians go to die, and that he offers one meat option on a menu that is otherwise entirely vegan and ninety-nine per cent local and made from scratch. His reasoning was never doctrinal — it is not that he thinks meat is evil, as some do, but that for health reasons he thinks less than twenty per cent of our diets should come from it. After a fire and a run of pop-ups, the restaurant moved into the long-idle former Maurepas Foods space, where two concepts now share one kitchen: Sneaky Pickle serves lunch Thursday to Monday, and every night from 5pm the same room becomes Bar Brine for dinner. Reservations open three weeks ahead.

Where Y'at's description is the accurate one: two businesses sharing one space, both committed to sourcing their food from small, locally operated farms. That sourcing is what makes the drinks worth a non-drinker's attention, because Bar Brine's bar runs on house-made cordials, shrubs and bitters rather than bought-in syrups — the same preserving instinct the name points at. The zero-proof drinks confirmed on the current list are the Seasonal Bitter, the Summer Buck and the Shrub 'N' Soda. A shrub is a drinking vinegar, fruit preserved in sugar and vinegar, and it is the single most useful thing a scratch bar can make for people who are not drinking, because the acidity gives a soft drink the sharp edge that alcohol normally supplies. A buck is the ginger-and-citrus format, dry rather than sweet. One practical limitation: the restaurant publishes its menus only as photographs, so ingredients and prices cannot be read online and the list rotates seasonally. A fourth drink documented in earlier coverage, a sugarcane juice cooler, could not be confirmed as current. Go, but ask at the bar rather than planning from the website.