The Crunkleton

The Crunkleton opened its Charlotte location in December 2018 at 1957 E 7th Street in historic Elizabeth, the second room from Gary Crunkleton, whose first bartending job was more than twenty years ago at an undergraduate bar in Chapel Hill while he was a student at the university there. The Charlotte bar is lodge-style and unhurried, built around a long bar and a floor-to-ceiling backbar, and it runs a full kitchen rather than bar snacks — a prime New York strip at $74, crab cakes at $26, a burger the menu calls simply a really good one at $19, and a house-made pecan pie. Dinner runs from 5pm nightly with weekend brunch from 11am. The bar operates a Top Shelf loyalty programme at $19.57 a year, a nod to the year that recurs through the room's design.

The zero-proof drinks have their own printed heading, "Non-Alcoholic Cocktails", and three of the five are genuinely alcohol-free and free of anything else. The N/A Sour ($13) is built on A Cut Above, the bar's own non-alcoholic gin, with elderflower syrup, lime, fresh ginger and cucumber. Painlesskiller ($13) is the tropical one — fresh pineapple, coconut cream, lime, orange and demerara syrup, a Painkiller with the rum taken out rather than replaced. A Phony Negroni ($13) uses the Spiritless negroni alternative. The other two items under that same heading need flagging clearly, because the heading does not distinguish them: Desert Bloom and Spiced Mule ($15 each) are built on Calmezzi THC spirits and each contain 4mg of THC. They are alcohol-free, which is why they sit in that section, but they are not mocktails, and anyone avoiding intoxicants of any kind should order from the first three. This pattern is worth knowing about across Charlotte generally, since Calmezzi's THC spirits are turning up under non-alcoholic headings at more than one bar in the city.