Non-alcoholic cocktail bar is not a bar, it’s a juice bar – 02/05/2024 – Cozinha Bruta

Going through my favorites that I save to read later (which, most of the time, I forget to do), I came across a review that the Los Angeles Times did for a cocktail bar called Stay.

It’s a beautiful place. It’s in Chinatown in Angelina, in a house modeled after a Chinese pagoda. The drinks are equally elegant and beautiful, selling for prices ranging from US$18 to US$24 (R$90 to R$120).

The entire drinks menu follows a common denominator: nothing has alcohol.

The Goat, which costs US$20 (R$100), contains non-alcoholic gin, Earl Gray and English breakfast teas, almond syrup and coconut cream, served warm with almond and juniper foam.

In addition to cocktails, the bar offers zero alcohol wines and beers or those with up to 0.5% alcohol content, which is the same for legal purposes.

It is, as they call it in the United States, a “zero proof” bar.

At first glance, a non-alcoholic bar can be placed in the same category as vegan restaurants. Mistake.

A vegan restaurant is still a restaurant that fulfills the purpose of restaurants: to feed people, even without animal products.

The purpose of the bar, I believe teetotalers agree, has always been to serve alcoholic drinks. Removing them completely robs the bar of its essence, leaving just a scenic bar, full of sober people drinking juice from crystal glasses.

A cocktail bar with all the customers on the same mental frequency as the Starbucks crowd is a vision of hell. Better to have an açaí with banana at Oakberry.

Nothing against non-alcoholic cocktails. Even those who drink sometimes want or need to put on the brakes, without resorting to horrendous zero beers or soft drinks.

Why take booze out of the equation? Religion? I highly doubt it. In the US, it is sometimes difficult or too expensive to obtain a license to sell goró, but this does not appear to be the case either.

It’s pure concept, pure proposal, pure marketing, pure foam.

I wouldn’t bet my little finger on the longevity of this place, but sometimes it happens. Even more so in California.

In Brazil, a place like that would close in two months.

No.

Wait.

I just remembered that in São Paulo a cabaret without call girls is successful. I take that back.

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