Tula's Kitchen

Tula's Kitchen is on Wyoming Boulevard in the north-east of Albuquerque, and it is a sister brand to Dion's — the New Mexico pizza chain that is close to a state institution. It is a family restaurant rather than a bar, and that is exactly why it is here.

New Mexico Magazine's survey of the city's non-alcoholic drinking includes it for a beverage list made up of tea, lemonade, Italian sodas, soft drinks and coffee mocktails, with no alcohol on it. The distinction from everywhere else in this guide is worth drawing out. Most venues here are licensed rooms with a good alcohol-free section, which means a non-drinker is choosing from a subset while everyone else chooses from the whole. At Tula's there is no subset — the whole table is ordering from the same list, and the question of who is drinking what never arises.

For certain readers that is the single most valuable property a restaurant can have. Someone recently sober, or in a family with children, or simply tired of the small negotiation that happens at every table, gets an evening where the issue is structurally absent rather than politely managed.

The coffee mocktails are the most interesting part of the list — coffee brings bitterness and body, the two things alcohol-free drinks most often lack — though the individual builds are not published, so none are recorded here and the entry is graded three.

Open 11am to 9pm Sunday through Thursday and 11am to 10pm on Friday and Saturday, seven days a week with no closed day. It is well north of the Old Town and Nob Hill clusters, so it serves its own neighbourhood rather than a night out downtown — which, for the families it is built for, is the point.