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Back in 2024, after a reporting trip for a whiskey magazine, I got tired of drinking. Perhaps it was the sluggishness I felt each morning, or maybe it was the podcast I’d heard while traveling, which shared the news that one or two glasses of red wine was not, as we had long been told, healthy. Whatever the reason, I tossed in the daily drinking towel after that trip, figuring that going forward, I might only have a drink or two every now and again.
But once I discovered that drink menus could serve up more than just overly sweet mocktails and that bartenders could do more with alcohol-free beverages than just shoot Sprite from a soda gun, I found it easier and easier to skip alcohol entirely when dining out. I noticed that my meals started to become more memorable and my taste buds felt less strangled from tannin-heavy wine pairings. I also realized that the nonalcoholic drinks not only complemented dishes, but at some of the best restaurants in the country—where tasting menus often tell a story about a region or season—the NA beverages were like the second, sober path in a choose your own adventure.
As it turns out, I was not alone on this dry journey: 2025 (nearly) belonged to the teetotaler. Since 1939, Gallup has tracked Americans’ drinking habits. For decades, the numbers always indicated that this was a nation of loyal imbibers. But in the more than eight decades that Gallup has tracked consumption behaviors, the percentage of Americans drinking alcohol has never been as low as 54 percent, as it was last year. While more than half of American adults still claim to drink, that number has decreased by 8 percentage points in the past two years, alongside the new research suggesting even moderate alcohol consumption is unhealthy.
Though abstinence may be better for us, those who love fine dining might feel like they’re doomed to have worse experiences without alcohol. Don’t worry! I’m happy to report that talented sommeliers, bartenders, and beverage managers are instead sourcing and creating some delicious NA alternatives—many of them arguably better culinary partners than the buzzy bottles they replace.
On a recent trip to New York’s Catskills region to experience the DeBruce’s winter tasting menu, my wife sipped various wines. I could see in her eyes that the reds transported her to the West Coast of the country. But the spirit-free beverages that the bartender paired with my meal delivered a different narrative. I cut into a thick square of reindeer moss coated in sourdough starter, layered with thin slices of lardo, and garlanded with capers. It was a dish unique to the region, a pioneer organism with more terroir than any grape. I gazed out on the landscape—a vista of trees and moss under snow—and sipped my “forest morning” soda, a drink crafted with house-made syrup infused with clove, juniper, and birch. I’d never had a single bite, sip, and view that made me so one with the setting.
Andrew Zimmern, a chef, James Beard winner, and famed television personality, has been recovering from alcohol addiction for more than three decades. His beverage options for most of the 21st century have been slim: A few years ago, he’d have been lucky to find even an NA beer on the menu. Thankfully, today, at many restaurants, there are often a half-dozen mocktails, dealcoholized wines, and beers, from Athletic to Heineken 0.0, to choose from. Zimmern has even watched a single 4-foot shelf dedicated to NA drinks in his local beverage market expand to take up a quarter of the store.
“I love how [NA beverages] get to speak without ethanol shouting on top of it,” Zimmern says.
And let’s face it, wouldn’t diners be bored if every dish on a tasting menu used the same ingredient? Why, then, are we so willing to pay for the repetitiveness of a single fruit? Yes, grape expressions in wines are quite diverse, but you can also present a piece of chicken eight different ways. I don’t think that’s an evening most of us would enjoy. For those choosing not to drink because they’re recovering alcoholics, opting for a healthier lifestyle, observing Dry January, or just losing interest in alcohol, having “options, sophistication, and access,” Zimmern says, “has made dining a joy.”
Gabriel Rucker, the James Beard award–winning chef at Le Pigeon in Portland, Oregon, has been sober since 2013. “But that doesn’t mean I want to be left out of the experience of curated beverages,” Rucker said. “Diet Coke is not necessarily what I want to have with my foie gras.”
At L’abeille, a one-Michelin-star French restaurant in Lower Manhattan, they serve a chenin blanc from Oregon with the foie gras on their tasting menu. But when someone opts for the NA pairing (which, it’s worth noting, is $100 dollars cheaper), the guest receives a pour from a bottle from the United Kingdom. It’s a sweet and summery roasted green tea that mimics some of the notes of a dry white, though it’s distinctly its own thing, pairing and cutting wonderfully through the richness of the bite.
Across the seven-dish tasting menu, many French wines are replaced with NA beverages sourced from Oregon and Norway. While most places might pair Champagne with a Kumamoto oyster with shiso sorbet, caviar, and mignonette, L’abeille’s sommelier found a sparkling chamomile tea with fig notes that improves the bite. As the menu progresses, tea-based drinks peppered with thyme or vanilla, lemongrass or yarrow, are complex and complementary. While sourcing and pairing fine beverages is the work of any good sommelier, sometimes the house has the winning offer. When L’abeille serves its duck au poivre as its final savory dish, there’s a house-made beet, orange, and ginger juice that contrasts with the duck’s gaminess, yet allies nicely with its peppery crust.
“Drinks should be complementary, but not the main event,” Rucker said. “You don’t want a glass of wine that’s so powerful that it overpowers the flavors on your plate.” The same is true with spirit-free drinks. High sugars kill taste buds, too. “If it’s done right,” Rucker said, “it can enhance” the tasting flow.
Zimmern doesn’t just see NA drinks as an opportunity for chefs and drink-makers to create harmony or lovely discordance within a meal. “I see [them as] closer to seasonings.”
At Yingtao, a one-Michelin-star Chinese restaurant in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood—and also a place of lovely discordance, where co-owner Bolun Yao scores riffs on his grandmother’s cooking with self-produced Chinese rap music—co-owner Linette Yao heads up the beverage program. While her alcohol-based pairings are probably delicious, it’s on the spirit-free pairing menu that she tells a more personal story with new takes. While tea often accompanies Chinese food of course, Yao pairs Yingtao’s spicy fluke sashimi drenched in kumquat and ginger with a jasmine green infused with gooseberry, kafir, and silver needle. But it’s not a traditional tea; this one is served in a wine bottle and has an effervescence that “lifts the spice element, but cleanses the palette,” says Yao.
Even more interesting is the pork Jiao Zi in a truffle-infused corn broth that she pairs with a drink she used to enjoy as a child: a glass of sweet baby corn boiled in milk, blended together, and amplified with sea salt and condensed milk. Guests can’t help but watch Yao return to that memory from youth as she explains her rationale for this pairing. One sip and you’re there with her. Go for the wine, and you’re somewhere else entirely.
The restaurant industry is the hospitality industry. The top restaurateurs understand that they need to give guests what they want. With a greater number of people giving up drinking or cutting back significantly—especially among Gen Z, the youngest generation of legal drinkers in America—nonalcoholic drink menus and spirit-free food pairings, Rucker says, aren’t a trend. “I think it’s here to stay,” he said. “People want options.” And those options can now be alcohol-free and an intensely satisfying part of an evening out.
