Yellow Door Taqueria (Lower Mills, Dorchester)

Lower Mills is a distinct pocket of Dorchester, a nineteenth-century mill village strung along the Neponset River at the Milton line, and Yellow Door Taqueria at 2297 Dorchester Avenue is one of its anchors. It was the group's first restaurant before the South End and Providence openings, and it retains the neighborhood-room feel: a bar that fills with regulars, a dining room that turns over families early and groups late, and a kitchen serving Cali-Mex tacos, bowls and shareables. Hours run to 11pm Sunday through Wednesday and midnight Thursday through Saturday, with brunch from 11am at weekends and lunch on Thursdays and Fridays.

The drinks matter here because this part of Dorchester has almost nothing else with a printed alcohol-free list. Yellow Door pours three named mocktails at $10, the same ones as the group's other rooms, and they are built from hand-squeezed juice and house syrups rather than from a bottled mix. Mango Vibes Only is mango, pineapple, coconut, agave and lime, the sweetest and most tropical of the three. Stitzer's Paloma is the useful one for anyone who normally drinks a paloma: house rosemary syrup, fresh grapefruit and lime juices, soda, and enough bitterness from the grapefruit to stop it reading as juice. Sober Baddie is pineapple and hibiscus with vanilla, toasted coconut, lime and soda. Jarritos in assorted flavours are $4. The programme has no non-alcoholic spirits behind it, which is why it is graded as a real but modest offering rather than a serious one, but the drinks are named, priced against the cocktail list rather than the soda list, and made to order at a bar that expects to be asked. The South End restaurant on Harrison Avenue pours the same three drinks, and the Boston Globe used the group as its case study in March 2026 when reporting on how far Boston restaurants have pushed the ambition, and the price, of their alcohol-free lists.