The Charles

The Charles opened in the Design District in 2018 and has stayed one of the harder Dallas reservations to get — a dim, loud, Italian-leaning room that treats dinner as an event rather than a meal. Its non-alcoholic drinks appear under a printed Mocktails heading on the Summer 2026 menu, refreshed in late July, which already puts it ahead of the many Dallas rooms whose zero-proof lists appear each January and quietly vanish by March.

Three builds carry the section. The Blossom Spritz is the most complete drink of the set, combining cherry blossom and grapefruit with Fre sparkling to give it length and lift — the one to order if you want something that reads as a cocktail across a candlelit table. The Nada Colada handles the creamy tropical end and the Blueberry di Capri the fruit-forward one. We would rather be straight about the ceiling here: none of the three uses a non-alcoholic distillate, so there is no botanical bitterness or spirit-like backbone to them, and the list sits a step below the Ritual, Lyre's and Almave programmes elsewhere in this guide. What they are is properly built, printed under their own heading, in a restaurant where the wine list is the main event.

The more quietly useful entry is the separate N/A Sparkling listing: Fre Brut, offered by the glass and by the bottle. At a table ordering wine, a bottle a non-drinker can actually share changes the evening more than a single cocktail does — it removes the moment where one person is handed something different while everyone else is poured from the same bottle. Service runs Monday to Thursday to 10pm and Friday and Saturday to 11pm, with the room closed on Sundays, so this is a dinner reservation rather than a drop-in. Worth knowing before you arrive from older coverage: the Lavender Limonata, Peary Freshe and Honey Please that appear in press write-ups have since come off the menu, and asking for them will get you a blank look. The distinction that matters is between a printed heading and a bartender willing to improvise: the first survives a change of staff and a busy Friday, the second does not. The Charles has the first, which is why it holds a place here despite the modest depth of the list itself.