Boozeless Cocktails

By me, in today's SF Chronicle:

Drink Menus Explore Virgin Territory with Alcohol-Free Cocktails Camper English, Special to the Chronicle

Bay Area restaurants and bars are increasingly devoting space on their menus to alcohol-free drinks. These concoctions are more complicated than simple sodas and juices, involving the same glassware, seasonal ingredients and fresh garnishes as drinks with the hard stuff.

This trend of enticing consumers with nonalcoholic cocktails, rather than leaving it to them to request a virgin version of another drink, owes much to the current emphasis in better cocktail bars on creating drinks with seasonal ingredients. These fresh drinks can be translated fairly easily into alcohol-free versions, whereas in other bars, a nonalcoholic Jack and Coke is just a Coke.

Josh Harris, bar manager of Palmetto on Union Street in Cow Hollow, says that in the first month or so of being open, the menu listed only drinks with alcohol, but patrons would see the fresh cocktails being made and request alcohol-free versions.

"Some of them translated (to nonalcoholic drinks) very well, and some of them not well at all," he says.

Read the rest of the story here.

Labels: bars, camper_clips, cocktails, SanFrancisco