Three Sheets

Three Sheets opened on Dalston's Kingsland Road in 2016, the work of brothers Max and Noel Venning, who came down from Manchester to build a bar around a stripped-back, ingredient-first philosophy. It first traded as Between the Sheets before the pair judged the name too suggestive and settled on Three Sheets. The room is tiny and deliberately spare — marble-topped tables, exposed brick and candlelight — with none of the theatre or clutter of a big-format cocktail bar; the focus is squarely on what is in the glass. That discipline has earned it a place on The World's 50 Best Bars list and a long-standing spot among London's most respected drinking rooms, and the brothers have since added a larger second site in Soho.

The list is organised into "sheets" that signal strength: One Sheet for lighter, lower-ABV drinks, Two Sheets for mid-strength and Three Sheets for the properly boozy — a structure that makes the bar unusually easy to navigate for anyone drinking less. Rather than treat alcohol-free as an afterthought, Three Sheets keeps a short, tightly edited zero-proof selection of roughly four drinks that mirrors the cocktail canon. Its alcohol-free classics run from a whisky sour and a negroni to an americano and an espresso martini, each built around elixirs from the Belgian Opius Distillery — a hand-made non-alcoholic spirit whose botanicals are formulated to act on the body (working on GABA receptors, comparably to ashwagandha) rather than simply imitate flavour.

The technique is what sets the drinks apart. For the alcohol-free negroni and americano the team infuses three different types of chilli into vegetable glycerin, which restores both the gentle heat and the rounder, weightier texture that alcohol would normally supply — thinness being the usual failing of a non-alcoholic cocktail. The result reads as a genuine drink rather than a soft-drink substitute. Anyone wanting low-ABV rather than fully alcohol-free is well served too, from the house-carbonated French 75 on the One Sheet list to a low-alcohol Rum & Plum built on Japanese ume plum liqueur. The zero-proof list is not always printed, so the standing advice is simply to ask — the bartenders will build it to the same exacting standard as everything else.