Soft Bar

Soft Bar is an all-day, fully alcohol-free cafe and cocktail bar at 200 Banker Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, opened in September 2025 by Bravo "Summer House" personality Carl Radke. By day it serves premium coffee, espresso, matcha and teas alongside light bites; in the evening it pours what the team calls "soft cocktails" — zero-proof drinks built by beverage director Richard Millwater, previously of Eleven Madison Park and Clemente Bar. Radke's framing of the concept is deliberate: "We don't make mocktails here, we make soft cocktails. It's an elevated, sophisticated, premium non-alcoholic drink."

The nine soft cocktails are built on the serious end of the non-alcoholic spirits market, and the bar layers several of them in one glass rather than making one-for-one swaps. Bitter Beginning stacks Three Spirit Social, Pathfinder and roots divino rosso over cherry sarsaparilla — three different alcohol-free products in a single drink, which is how you build the depth a bitter aperitif needs. Foam Party runs jasmine-infused Seedlip Grove and roots divino bianco against acidified pineapple, almond orgeat and coffee under a jasmine foam. Garden Party is the savoury outlier, taking almave blanco into tomato, basil, lemon thyme and lemon verbena with aquafaba for texture — aquafaba being the liquid from cooked chickpeas, which whips like egg white and is how a shaken drink gets its head without egg or dairy.

The cafe list is a menu in its own right rather than an afterthought: Steel Magnolia pairs lavender earl grey with espresso or matcha under a salted honey cloud, Low Flame runs hazelnut and reishi cacao with maple, and Indigo Muse is a butterfly pea flower milk tea. Bar snacks run to citrus-marinated Castelvetrano and Nicoise olives, a house mix of roasted chickpeas and fava beans with urfa chili and thyme, and chili snap peas with lime and sesame.

One thing to know before ordering, because our readers include people in recovery: every soft cocktail is built around a functional botanical, and the menu prints it beside each drink — ashwagandha, reishi, lion's mane, damiana leaf, California poppy, cordyceps, ginseng and rhodiola among them. None of these is alcohol, and the bar is entirely alcohol-free. But they are active ingredients rather than flavourings, and anyone on medication, pregnant, or who would simply rather drink something inert should say so at the bar and order from the cafe side instead.

It is closed Mondays, and opens at eight in the morning the rest of the week, running to ten at night Tuesday through Saturday and seven on Sunday.