Spice Finch

Spice Finch sits on South 17th Street just off Rittenhouse Square, cooking a Mediterranean menu built around spice blends — the name is not decorative, and the kitchen's identity is the pantry. That matters for the drinks, because the three non-alcoholic cocktails on its printed list are built from the same shelf as the food rather than from a separate bottle of syrup.

Tradewinds is the clearest example. It combines mint tea with a coriander syrup and lemon, and coriander seed is the ingredient worth paying attention to: warm and faintly citrusy, closer to orange peel than to the fresh herb, it is one of the defining botanicals in gin. Used in a syrup against mint and lemon, it gives the drink an aromatic backbone that a mint lemonade would never have.

Cooler Than A Cucumber runs the same logic with juniper — the botanical that legally makes gin gin — alongside cucumber and lime. Anyone who misses a gin and tonic will recognise what is happening here immediately; it is the flavour architecture of the drink with the ethanol removed, rather than a substitute pretending to be something else. French 37.5 is the aperitif of the three, grapefruit and lavender lengthened with lemon and tonic, and the tonic's quinine bitterness gives it a genuinely dry finish.

The pricing deserves a mention because it is unusual. At six and seven dollars these are among the cheapest properly-constructed zero-proof drinks in Philadelphia, and two of the three fall to four dollars during happy hour. Most bars price non-alcoholic cocktails within a dollar or two of the alcoholic ones on the grounds that the labour is identical — which is defensible — but the effect is that a non-drinker often pays fourteen dollars for something with no spirit in it. Spice Finch does not, and over an evening that difference is substantial.

The restaurant opens at four in the afternoon on weekdays and adds a late-morning service at weekends, closing at nine throughout.