When we went to Next Childhood, one of our main comments was “We wish we could have had one drink and then had the non-alcoholic drink pairings the rest of the night.” We would have been sorry to miss the aperol-based cocktail that started the evening— just the fact that we, cocktail-aphasic as we mostly are, can remember what was in it says a lot. But after that, as nice as the wine choices were, we were consistently impressed by the imagination and flavor of the non-alcoholic beverages, which were only about a million times better than the drab, no-fun substitutes (lime for your soda water, sir?) you might expect when someone doesn’t drink in a fine restaurant. The blog Eating the World apparently feels the way we do, because they’ve devoted an entire post to the non-alcoholic pairings at Next Sicily, explaining what each one is and describing it (without too much wine-like pretension), from the Zucchini and Mount Olympus Flower (“completely delicious and enchanting, with hints of lemon and sage. Despite its billing, we couldn’t really detect any of the zucchini flavor notes”) to the Green Tomato, Garlic and White Pepper (“complemented the swordfish quite nicely, and flavor echoed the herbal notes of the mint pesto. Fans of V8 or the like will be pleased”). [Eating the World]
