Postado em sexta-feira, 31 de janeiro de 2025 09:02

Drinking is down. That’s a problem for bars that depend on high-margin booze to pay the bills.

A decade ago, it was big news when Atera, a tasting-menu restaurant in Tribeca, offered an alcohol-free negroni to pair with its food. It was such an outlier that it required a lot of in-house trickery to mimic the gin. But more recently, when the owners of Lord’s wanted a zero-proof cocktail, they simply turned to one of the many new N/A “spirits” on the market: Pentire “gin,” an English brand made with Cornish sea salt, rock samphire, and saffron.

Patricia Howard says her husband and business partner, Ed Szymanski, wasn’t immediately sold on the idea of offering a $15 teetotaling negroni: “Ed at first was a hater and then looked at the numbers and was like, ‘Oh, this is a significant revenue stream, and we should keep doing this.’” Szymanski cops to the change of heart that followed his initial skepticism. “I thought this was going to be really niche, like a few cocktails kind of thing,” he says. “It’s like several hundred dollars’ worth of sales a day — it really does move the needle.”

And it’s just one of many nouveau mocktails that are being made around the city in response to a decrease in drinking. This month, the U.S. surgeon general called for alcoholic beverages to carry cancer warnings like cigarettes. One 2023 survey found that spending on alcohol among adults under 25 has dropped 60 percent since 2003. And a widely shared Gallup survey from the same year found the number of Americans under the age of 34 who drink has fallen 10 percent in the last decade, while those who do drink are drinking less. On top of that, nearly half of all Americans — and two-thirds of young adults — believe that even moderate drinking negatively affects health. Even those who might not care could be wary of drinking too much in public: “I’m 34 and when I was getting blackout drunk at 21, no one was posting it on social media,” says Darwin Pornel, a co-owner of the bar Mister Paradise. “For this generation, there’s an awareness about having your behavior caught on a million cameras.”

From a public-health standpoint, these are positive developments. But bar and restaurant owners are looking at how these trends might affect the bottom line. “You could barely open a newspaper or a website without having some mention of Dry January or the surgeon general wanting to put labels on bottles,” says Ruairi Curtin, an owner of several bars including Albert’s, the Penrose, and the Spaniard. A push to make N/A drinks more interesting, so that they might be able to make up for any lost revenue, is, Curtin says, “absolutely” a response to any worries about sober customers: “You make a lot more money selling somebody a $12 zero-proof cocktail than you do selling them a $3 club soda.”

The assignment facing bartenders, then, is coming up with alcohol-free cocktails that customers will want to pay $12 — or more, ideally — to drink. “The problem people see with it is, you create an N/A drink and then charge the full price,” Pornel tells me. What drinkers often don’t realize is that alcohol contributes almost nothing to the final price of a drink. At Mister Paradise, the N/A Cosmo — a mix of cranberry and orange juices, simple syrup, and nonalcoholic Seedlip Grove — costs $1.59 to make. (The Seedlip alone costs $1.09 to add to the drink.) He sells it for $12. A full-strength Cosmo costs just 30 cents more: One ounce of Cointreau costs $1; an ounce and a half of Skyy vodka costs just 57 cents. The perceived value of alcohol among the public means Pornel can sell that drink for $17.

Trying to explain all this at the bar is impossible, of course. “It’s a losing battle — condescending. What am I going to do, break out a P&L statement at the table when they complain?” says Nick Padilla, an owner of El Pingüino, where N/A drinks tend to run a few dollars less than whatever the cheapest alcoholic cocktail costs, even though the cost to make each is similar. “We’re not doing any funny math,” he adds.

In response to the increased demand — from customers and operators who want to offer more N/A options — a number of new products have hit the market: faux gins, phony negronis, and plenty of N/A beer. When former bartender Mikey McFerran launched Good Time in 2023, he made a point to focus on bars and restaurants, rather than retail, as an avenue for expansion. Even he’s been surprised by the sales. “At some bars, they’re going through a case a week. I had expected two cases a month,” he says. “When I started bartending in New York, it would take us five months to get through a case of O’Doul’s.”

Bartenders also have more resources and techniques available to create drinks. Sunken Harbor Club’s Garret Richard compares bartending now to a couple of decades ago when the craft-cocktail boom started to take off. “Back then, you had your ingredients you made like ginger syrup, or cinnamon if you were fancy, but the idea of having an intense prep program is only now a default for cocktail bars,” he says. He’s able to approach recipe development the same, regardless of the alcohol content. He’s especially happy with a drink called the Scrimshaw, a mix of elderflower syrup, clarified grapefruit juice, and Pathfinder — a hemp-based “amaro” that several other bartenders mentioning liking specifically because it’s “trying to be its own thing” instead of attempting to replicate the flavor of something like Fernet-Branca or Nonino.

For now, sales of traditional cocktails still surpass mocktails by a huge margin, but new ways to drink without getting drunk means even customers who do imbibe are increasingly curious in N/A drinks. At Le Veau d’Or, bar manager Sarah Morrissey says it’s not unusual for each of the restaurant’s 15 tables to have at least one alcohol-free drink in the mix. “There are nights where I’m like, Holy shit, everyone has one.”

 

by Chris Crowley, senior writer at Grub Stree | GRUB STREET | New York Magazine