The Penrose

The Penrose sits on Second Avenue between 82nd and 83rd, and its self-description — the Upper East Local — is accurate about both its ambitions and its value. It is a gastropub with warm lighting and vintage fittings, the kind of room that fills with regulars rather than destination-seekers. What lifts it into this directory is that its zero-proof list is not a gesture.

Eleven non-alcoholic cocktails are named and built, and the naming tells you the kitchen understands what a person ordering them actually wants — not a fruit juice, but the shape of a familiar drink. Express Yourself stands in for an espresso martini. Garden Tonic is the zero-proof gin and tonic. Love That For You is the no-booze spritz, Peach Fuzz the boozeless bellini, Feels Like Summer the virgin mojito, That's Amore an almost-amaretto-sour, Sunday Kinda Love the virgin bloody mary, Stubborn Love a mule without the liquor, and Good Vibrations a no-alcohol negroni sbagliato, with Amor Prohibido rounding out the list. Lyre's non-alcoholic prosecco is poured by the glass, and non-alcoholic beer and sodas sit alongside.

The honest framing matters. The Penrose is a full bar. It serves cocktails, beer, wine and spirits, and the room will be full of people drinking them. For a lot of readers that is exactly right — the thing they want is to meet friends somewhere ordinary and not be handed a glass of orange juice — and for others, particularly anyone early in recovery, a fully alcohol-free room like Soft Bar or Mockingbird will be the better call. This guide lists both because both are needed.

What The Penrose offers that almost nothing else in upper Manhattan does is hours. It opens at 11:30am on weekdays and 9:30am at weekends, and runs to 4am every single night. The Upper East Side is comparatively bare for this category — the neighbourhood's dedicated non-alcoholic bottle shop closed, and there is no alcohol-free bar above 96th Street — so a room that will make you a properly constructed zero-proof drink at one in the morning is doing real work. Eleven options also means you can go repeatedly without ordering the same thing, which sounds trivial and is one of the most common complaints about drinking without alcohol in bars.