Volare Italian Ristorante

Frankfort Avenue through Clifton is one of Louisville's genuine restaurant streets — a long run of independent rooms rather than a nightlife strip — and Volare has been near the top of it for years. Readers of Louisville Magazine named it Best Italian Restaurant three consecutive years; the name means to fly, the menu changes seasonally around locally sourced produce and house-made pasta, and the service culture is the old-fashioned kind where the same server looks after you all evening.

Most Italian restaurants with a bar will make a non-drinker a sweet fizzy thing. Volare builds Spiritless Manhattans, and the distinction is worth spelling out. A manhattan is spirit, aromatised wine and bitters, stirred and served up — no citrus, no soda, nothing to hide behind. It is the single hardest classic to render without alcohol, because the whole drink is the spirit's weight and the bitters' edge. Doing it means owning a non-alcoholic bourbon good enough to carry the glass, and Volare uses Kentucky 74, made across town by Spiritless using reverse distillation to strip alcohol from a finished distillate while keeping its caramel and oak. That a neighbourhood Italian restaurant in Louisville offers a stirred, spirit-forward, alcohol-free drink as a matter of course says something about how far the category has travelled in this city.

For planning: dinner service only, from 4:30pm seven nights, running to 10pm Sunday through Thursday and 11pm on Friday and Saturday. Reservations are advisable at weekends. Clifton puts three other entries in this guide on the same avenue — Fork & Barrel at 1722, Pizza Lupo at 1540 — so an evening on Frankfort Avenue is one of the easier ones in Louisville to plan around not drinking.