Welcome to the Neighborhood: No More Café, 352 East 13th Street
Today we welcome a new small business to our neighborhoods — help us welcome the next. Tell us which new independent store in Greenwich Village, the East Village, or NoHo you’re excited about by emailing us at info@villagepreservation.org.
As advocates for local small business, we find great satisfaction in hearing of new independent establishments opening in our neighborhoods. These arrivals give us hope that reports of the death of mom-and-pops have been greatly exaggerated. Whenever such occasions present themselves, we like to share our enthusiasm with the world in the hopes that others will join us in wishing our new neighbors a warm welcome, and more tangibly, patronize and spread the word to help ensure their success and survival.
“No más!” (i.e., no more) called out all-time pugilist great Roberto “Manos de Piedra” Durán during his first rematch with Sugar Ray Leonard to indicate that he was giving up. But you yourself don’t have to give up much of anything when you visit No More Café (352 East 13th Street, btw. 2nd and 1st Avenues), a recently opened, beautifully appointed zero-proof cocktail bar where revelers can revel without running their bodies down.
Recent empirical findings in public health have put many of us in a pickle. On the one hand, they’ve concluded that — earlier studies notwithstanding — alcohol is (surprise, surprise!) not such a healthful elixir, after all. On the other, they’ve determined that we’re socializing and going out increasingly less, resulting in a loneliness epidemic that is slowly killing us. Unfortunately, the backdrop for these warnings is a culture that has for hundreds years placed alcohol at the center of social gatherings. It stands to reason that our social venues overwhelmingly reflect this cultural priority. And those places have much to recommend them. But wouldn’t it be nice to have an alternative? That’s the question that Rodrigo Nogueira posed himself when he took stock of his own social life. By then, he had spent over a decade working in the restaurant industry, which is renowned for its hard drinking ways both in the front and back of the house.
Rodrigo moved to the city to go to culinary school. He tended bar during his school years and then worked for a variety of restaurants in town for several years, before moving to New Orleans, then to Los Angeles, and then working as a corporate chef for Michael Mina’s restaurant group. During one of these stops, Rodrigo decided to cut back on his drinking. This created a problem, because it’s not like he wanted an athletic or spiritual pursuit to take the place formerly occupied by social drinking in his life. Rodrigo still very much liked going out to bars; he just couldn’t find a place he enjoyed that didn’t remind him that he wasn’t drinking. So he decided to open one himself. It would be an experiment, since nothing like it seemed to exist in the country. And the right place for testing experiments, Rodrigo felt, was New York City.
Most great projects begin with a strong idea. Rodrigo’s was oysters and martini, which is a strong idea indeed! He wanted to reproduce the pleasures of that pairing and of the places that serve it — except without the alcohol. This did not prove to be as easy as it sounded. As a practical matter, Rodrigo disliked 99% of the N/A spirits and cocktails he tried. As a conceptual matter, he wanted to avoid serving N/A versions of existing drinks, because those create impossible-to-meet expectations. In the end, he decided to solve both problems by putting his culinary skills to use and making his own cocktails from scratch.
Rodrigo’s goal was to create cocktails complex and exciting enough to make customers forget that they weren’t consuming alcohol. It took him about two months of experimentation to get there. By the time he did, he had over a dozen bases that he was happy with, enough to produce cocktails with the right mouthfeel and in a wide range of flavor profiles. While these cocktails were vaguely inspired by the classics, you’d be hard pressed to find a one-to-one correspondence among them (although a word to the wise: if you’re looking for something to have with oysters, Olive Mirage is the one). The best way to choose one is to simply tell the friendly bartender what you like: Sweet and tropical? Acidic and refreshing? Spicy and caliente? Deep into the bitter end? At least one of the cocktails on the menu is sure to hit the spot.
The amount of craftsmanship that goes into each of No More’s cocktail bases far exceeds that involved in opening a bottle of Tanqueray. One of them, for instance, calls for ginger, vegetable glycerine, gluten, toasted rye, corn, and barley, charred banana, and burnt oak chips. And that’s before you get to the spices and herbs (black pepper, star anise, cloves, angelica root…). The result is far richer and compelling than mocktails, which taste like a reminder of what they’re not. The cocktails have proven popular enough that Rodrigo has begun supplying them to high-end restaurants and bottling them for sale to customers looking to offer a refined N/A drink at a special occasion.
No More Café lives up in other respects to Rodrigo’s initial vision for his place. It feels exactly like a bar but without the alcohol — precisely the kind of spot he had been looking for. It’s light, airy, and evocative of a Parisian café. Its menu complements the cocktails with a small selection of N/A beer (from award-winning Athletic Brewing) and wine, and with a great selection of shareable small plates. Live jazz plays on Thursdays. And a mixed crowd of not even primarily dry customers enlivens the proceedings. As a bonus, because Rodrigo does the prep for his hand-crafted cocktails during the day, he is happy to also serve customers during those hours. All the more opportunities for you to swing by, welcome No More Café to the neighborhood, and knock down one or two. Or even three! It’s not like you’ll need a designated driver!
If you would like us to welcome another independent business to the neighborhood, please let us know at info@villagepreservation.org.