The Eddy

The Eddy sits on the street it is named for, in downtown Providence, and it has spent a decade as the bar other Rhode Island bartenders measure themselves against. It wins Best of Rhode Island's Best Cocktail List with the regularity of a fixture rather than a contender. What earns it a place here is not the trophy shelf but two structural decisions that make it genuinely usable if you are not drinking.

The first is a standing spirit-free section on the printed menu — not a seasonal special, not something you have to ask about. The second is more unusual and more valuable: an asterisk system. Cocktails on the main list that can be built without spirit are marked with a single asterisk, and the legend at the bottom of the menu spells it out plainly. That turns a two-drink section into a meaningful slice of the whole list, and it removes the part non-drinkers dislike most, which is having to ask a busy bartender to improvise and then hope.

The spirit-free builds themselves are made the way the rest of the list is made — around acid and bitterness rather than sugar. From Miles Away runs mint and passionfruit against ginger and lime over soda. El Angel is the sharper of the two, built on black currant with a ginger shrub, lime and soda; a shrub is a drinking vinegar, and it does the work that a bitter aperitif would do in the alcoholic version. Both sit at nine dollars, several below the bar's full-strength cocktails.

For beer drinkers there is Athletic Brewing's non-alcoholic IPA on the bottle and can list at seven dollars, alongside a deep local draught line-up from Rhode Island brewers. One practical note: published guides to this bar go stale fast. Three separate drink names credited to The Eddy in recent Rhode Island round-ups — a Mai Chai, an Autumn Gimlet and a Hibiscus Breeze — were not on the menu when we checked. El Angel was. Read the list when you sit down.