Sugar Monk

Sugar Monk sits on Frederick Douglass Boulevard near the Apollo, and it is one of the few bars in New York whose drinks genuinely could not be made anywhere else. Ektoras Binikos — a mixologist, distiller and visual artist from the Greek island of Ikaria, with a thirty-year career behind him — founded it with Simon Jutras, a Montreal-born photographer and designer, to revive the spirit of the Harlem speakeasy. The botanical programme is not decorative: the forager Tama Matsuoka Wong has supplied the bar with wild plants, roots, fruits and flowers for years, and those go into aromatic bitters, tinctures, infusions and syrups used across the list, with the ethnobotanist Elizabeth Kontou of Ikaria also credited. More unusually still, the bar makes its own non-alcoholic spirits at a Brooklyn micro-distillery under the Atheras Spirits name, including a zero-proof amaro and a zero-proof sweet vermouth — so several of its alcohol-free drinks are built from components that exist nowhere else. It opens at 5pm and runs to half past one in the morning.

One thing must be read carefully here, and it is the reason this entry has been rewritten. The menu's non-alcoholic-looking section is headed Follow the Gleams and subtitled "Low ABV/Non-Alcoholic" — and that first half is doing real work. Two of its five drinks contain a substantial amount of alcohol, with the strength printed on the menu: the Ganesha at 19% ABV and the Strawberry Spritz at 25% ABV, which contains Aperol and sparkling wine, both $18. Anyone scanning for the alcohol-free part of the list could order either by mistake. The genuinely zero-proof drinks in that section are three: Butterfly Field at $16, on Lyre's London Spirit with yuzu, lime, lavender, butterfly pea, orange blossom and juniper — note it contains pasteurised egg white; Ba-Lue Bolivar at $16, clarified, on Seedlip Spice 94 with grape, green apple, Meyer lemon, cinnamon and patchouli; and a Negroni Sbagliato at $16 built on Pathfinder with the house Atheras zero-proof vermouth. There is also a Faux Negroni at $12, explicitly labelled non-alcoholic, on the daily 5–7pm happy hour menu. Order those by name and the bar is superb.