I’m doing Dry January, and Raleigh’s spirit-free bar makes it delightful
As I stepped inside my first alcohol-free bar, I expected to find a scene much like my great aunt’s funeral — everyone grim-faced eating chicken salad in a church basement, sipping lukewarm and unsweetened tea, wishing for merrier times.
Instead, I found a sleek and modern lounge glowing with soft blue light, populated by young couples chatting vivaciously on a Friday night while Rihanna’s “Kiss It Better” played in the background — loud, but not too loud.
My server at Umbrella Dry Bar, Raleigh’s new zero-proof cocktail bar, presented me with a menu full of playfully named drink options: I Am Alive & Awake, No More Zzzs and Daang, Look at Surely’s Temple.
And when I picked my non-poison, she delivered an amaretto sour containing boozeless bourbon — which I declare delicious, having been sober enough to know.
For the second-straight year, I am observing Dry January — that annual test of restraint now spreading into its second decade. This rite of self-denial comes armed with these data points from the Pew Research Center: 62% of Americans call themselves drinkers, and 1 in 5 report drinking too much.
In my profession, the road to sobriety follows an unfamiliar trail — one generally requiring at least three stops to ask for directions.
News scribblers own a history whose pages are damp from the rings from martini glasses — an outlook on life perhaps best described by H.L. Mencken:
“It is not the drinker,” he said, “but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world has gone to the dogs.”
As a cub reporter, I interviewed famed political writer and TV pundit Jack Germond before he gave a speech in town, and as he fielded my minor-league questions, a waiter passed him a cocktail glass.
“No secret I drink,” he said, sipping while I scribbled.
So with the mind of avoiding this notorious occupational pitfall, I will shelve my weekend beer mug and enjoy a Jarrito’s rather than the El Jefe margarita at Gringo a Go Go.
Umbrella Dry Bar occupies the West Martin Street space where Garland recently closed, taking with it the folk story of Robert Plant stopping in for a post-show midnight snack.
But I most enjoy the idea of an alcohol-free bar setting up only footsteps from where booze-hating crusader Carrie Nation stormed the Raleigh saloons in 1907, sticking her head into a pool room and shouting, “You men ought to be out of here! You are hatching out vagrants in this place.”
One thing I noticed about the zero-proof experience at Umbrella Dry Bar: you can actually hear conversations. A long-stemmed glass of Free Spirits gin provides the prop for making sophisticated conversation without the side effects that make it increasingly shouted and slurred.
And there’s something for every sober palate: a glass of pinot noir, a flute of champagne or a draft pilsner — familiar to the barfly in all ways but one.
Who knows? I may stretch this teetotaling into Dry February, though the temptations of Groundhog Day will be hard to resist.
And I might go searching for a non-alcoholic experience more suited to my dive bar tastes, a place where darts get thrown accurately, pool balls are surprisingly easy to sink and the evening ends with a fake fight.
