Stargazer

Stargazer opened in December 2024 in the former Dangerous Man Brewing growler room in Northeast Minneapolis, and its pedigree is unusual: a collaboration between the Travail Collective owners — Bob Gerken, James Winberg and Mike Brown — and Robb Jones of the James Beard-nominated Meteor, who serves as beverage director and has described Stargazer as "a slightly more polished Meteor." It is intimate, walk-in friendly, galaxy-themed, and serves Italian-inspired small plates alongside the drinks. Menus arrive through an interactive star-map QR app, and the roughly fifty drinks are organised into constellations. Nothing is batched — every drink is built from scratch to order, which at that menu size is a serious operational commitment.

The non-alcoholic offering is a named Spirit-Free Sector on that menu rather than a footnote, and the builds show the same construction thinking as the rest. Purple Phase combines Three Spirit Social with pineapple, coconut and lime. Fireless Squad layers Dhos Orange and Three Spirit Livener with pomegranate and lime. Negroni Stylie covers the bitter aperitif register, and It Was All Yellow rounds out the four. Beyond the named cocktails the bar makes its own botanical ferments and stocks a local spirit-free sparkling option, which matters for anyone who wants something to toast with rather than sip.

What makes the room genuinely useful is the combination of that list with the format. A walk-in cocktail bar with fifty scratch-built drinks and a standing zero-proof section is the closest thing a non-drinker gets to the ordinary experience of wandering into a good bar without a plan — no booking, no advance research, no asking the bartender what they can improvise. Tuesday through Saturday, to 11pm at the weekend, closed Sundays and Mondays. Northeast Minneapolis has more breweries per block than almost anywhere in the Midwest, which makes a scratch cocktail bar with a named spirit-free section a genuinely different proposition from its neighbours rather than one more taproom.