St. Cecilia

St. Cecilia has been open since January 2014 at 3455 Peachtree Road in Buckhead's Pinnacle Building, from chef-proprietor Ford Fry. It is named for the patron saint of music and the sirens of Greek mythology, and the 160-seat room leans on Romanesque tiled columns and distressed mirrors. The cooking is coastal European — fresh pasta, crudo and roasted fish drawn from the Ligurian coast and the wider Italian, Spanish and French shorelines.

Its non-alcoholic programme is one of the oldest serious ones in the city, and Resy's line is the accurate one: St. Cecilia was offering non-alcoholic cocktails before it was cool. The list has been running since well before the zero-proof spirits boom, which shows in how it is built.

The drinks use no packaged non-alcoholic spirits at all. They are constructed from fresh juice, honey and herbs, in the opera theme the restaurant's name invites: Madame Butterfly is grapefruit, lemon and honey; La Bohème works almond and lavender against lemon and pineapple; Carmensita is blueberry and pomegranate with thyme and lemon.

That is a genuinely different philosophy from the prevailing one, and it has aged well. Most zero-proof menus now start from a bottled substitute — an NA gin, an NA aperitivo — and build a familiar cocktail around it. St. Cecilia's approach treats the drink as its own thing rather than as an imitation of an alcoholic one, which sidesteps the problem those substitutes still have: they are expensive, they vary wildly in quality, and the good ones are trying to taste like something that is not there. Honey gives body where alcohol would, thyme and lavender give the aromatic length, and the result does not invite comparison to a drink it is not.

Lunch runs weekdays, with the bar through the afternoon and dinner nightly.