The Sylvester

The Sylvester opened in April 2019 in Midtown Miami from Ben Potts and Brian Nasajon, the Florida natives behind Beaker & Gray, taking over the former Bardot space on North Miami Avenue. The room leans into vintage Miami — retro wallpaper, repurposed antique furniture — and reopened in 2021 with a refreshed Florida-themed menu built on locally sourced ingredients. DJs play Thursday through Saturday, which places it firmly in nightlife rather than in restaurant dining.

Its alcohol-free drinks sit in a named menu section headed No Hangovers, and the naming is doing something. A section called Mocktails signals a compromise; No Hangovers reframes the choice as an advantage, which is a small piece of copywriting that changes how it feels to order from it in a bar at midnight.

The builds are made to order and use real products rather than juice. The Dama Verde combines Aplos Ease and Ritual Zero Proof Gin with honeydew and matcha, clarified. The Venetian Pathway is Pathfinder Hemp & Root with raspberry cordial and soda. The Sex Panther V.26 works Seedlip Grove with vanilla, passion fruit and mint. Heineken 0.0 covers anyone who would rather have a beer.

Three named zero-proof cocktails using three different alcohol-free spirits is a deliberate range rather than a default bottle — Aplos, Ritual and Pathfinder each behave differently, and stocking all three means the bar has tasted the category rather than ordered from it.

It is a full cocktail bar with DJs and a late crowd. The No Hangovers section is a genuine part of the menu rather than the character of the venue, which for a Midtown night out is exactly the point. Midtown is walkable to Wynwood and the Design District, which makes this an easy first or last stop on an evening rather than a destination in itself.