Space Bar

Space Bar opened on 18 November 2023 at 22 Market Square, and it is exactly as committed to its theme as the name suggests: a room of screens showing the vastness of space, neon, and drinks built with molecular technique. It comes from an unlikely pair. Elizabeth Menzel is a retired trauma healer who goes by Healer to the Stars; Dale Thomas Vaughn is a science-fiction writer who has worked in artificial intelligence with Microsoft and Google. Vaughn's explanation of the point is better than most bar mission statements: a spaceship is inherently optimistic, people need hope right now, and they want to be a centre for the dreamers. Arum Krause built the drinks programme. The kitchen is entirely vegetarian, running to an Olympus Mons Gyro made with oyster mushrooms and house-made socca and a Binary Hummus Platter with edamame and roasted beet hummus. It opens at 4pm, until 11pm most nights and midnight at weekends, and closes on Mondays.

Our rating for this bar has been raised, and the reason is worth setting out. When Space Bar opened, coverage noted it had no dedicated zero-proof menu — any cocktail could be made virgin on request, which is better than nothing but is not a programme. That is no longer the description. A dated 2026 Pittsburgh guide records that the bar keeps five or six non-alcoholic cocktails available at any given time, calls it one of the most robust non-alcoholic cocktail offerings in the city year-round, and singles out an NA Tartooine Sour as a favourite; the bar has also hosted a Pittsburgh mocktail meetup. Molecular technique is genuinely useful here in a way it is not everywhere — foams, gels, clarified juices and smoke give a zero-proof drink the texture and theatre that alcohol usually supplies, which is why a bar like this can make a better alcohol-free cocktail than a conventional one. The honest limitation is that the live menu is published through an ordering system we cannot read, so we cannot list the current five or six by name. Go and ask; there will be more than one.