Tony's Siesta

Tony's Siesta is on Brooklyn Avenue in River North, near the Pearl and a short walk from Idle Beer Hall and Isidore. It is a bar rather than a restaurant, and it keeps mocktails on the menu all year, including a build using non-alcoholic rum.

The year-round part is the whole point of this listing. Every January a wave of bars discovers the alcohol-free customer, prints a Dry January menu, collects the press coverage, and quietly removes it in February. For someone doing a one-month challenge that is fine. For someone who has actually stopped drinking — which is a permanent condition, not a seasonal one — it is worse than useless, because it teaches you that a venue's published list cannot be trusted in March. A bar that carries the same drinks in July is making a much smaller promise and keeping it, which is worth more.

The non-alcoholic rum matters for a related reason. Rum is one of the harder spirits to substitute convincingly — its character comes from sugar, funk and barrel age rather than from botanicals — so a bar stocking an NA version is buying a specialist product with limited use rather than reaching for the nearest syrup.

The hours are among the best in the guide: 4pm to 2am Monday through Friday, and from 2pm at weekends, every day of the week. Combined with Idle Beer Hall next door, Brooklyn Avenue gives a non-drinker two genuinely late options within a couple of minutes of each other — and in a city where much of the alcohol-free provision closes by seven, that is the most useful thing on this page. The Pearl is a short walk north, so an evening can start with dinner there and end here without anyone needing to drive.