The Bower

The Bower is at 1320 Magazine Street in the Lower Garden District — worth stating plainly, because at least one published guide has printed a Metairie address for it, which is wrong. It opened in March 2020 as a farm-to-table American restaurant from Mark Latter of Latter Hospitality, the group behind Tujague's, and managed three days of service before the pandemic closed everything. It came back. In January 2022 the group added the Bower Bar next door in the old Claret wine bar space, twenty seats around a central bar and twenty-four more at tables, with living green walls planted by a local landscape studio. Marcus Woodham runs the kitchen and Mickey Mullins the bar. Latter's own line about the food is the useful one: chef Marcus will make you want to eat vegetables, even if you are not vegetarian. Service runs from 4pm daily, with happy hour from 4 to 6.

The non-alcoholic drinks are printed under a plain heading, NON-ALCOHOLIC, and there are three of them, each $9. That price is the thing to notice. The full cocktails on the same card run $14 to $17, so the zero-proof drinks are roughly half — and they are made in-house rather than poured from a bottled non-alcoholic brand, which usually pushes prices the other way. Moody Judy is a vanilla bean lemonade with butterfly pea flower, the blue-violet flower that shifts colour as acid hits it, so the drink changes in the glass as the lemon works through. No-Loma is grapefruit, lime and soda — the simplest of the three and the one that lasts an evening. Walk the Lime is sweet lime and coconut, and is closer to dessert. None of them pretends to be a spirit, which is a deliberate choice and a defensible one; a kitchen this committed to local produce is going to build a drink from fruit rather than from an imported bottle. It is a short list, but it is honest, cheap and made on the premises.