How we verify venues

What the Verified badge means

A listing carries the Verified badge when someone on our side has confirmed, directly with the venue or from the venue's own published menu, that the non-alcoholic offering described here actually exists. That means a real menu, a real phone call, or the venue's own current published information — not an assumption drawn from the name or the neighborhood.

Every venue page shows a last verified date. Menus and hours change constantly in hospitality, so treat anything older than a few months as a starting point and confirm with the venue before you make a trip.

What it doesn't mean

• It isn't an endorsement, a rating, or a review. We don't rank venues.
• It isn't paid. No venue can buy a badge, a position, or a place in the directory.
• It isn't a guarantee about a specific visit. Staff change, menus get cut, and a bar with a great zero-proof list in March may have dropped it by September.

Four different checks

There are two separate things we can tell you about a venue, and we keep them apart on purpose:

• Listing confirmed — the business has a current public listing and is reported as open. This is an automated check against public business data. It tells you the place exists. It tells you nothing about the drinks.
• Policy corroborated — Google's own business data lists the venue as serving no beer and no wine. It's an automated cross-check of the one claim that matters most, but nobody has visited or called.
• Website evidence — the venue's own site publishes terms like "mocktail" or "zero-proof". They're saying it publicly, which is real evidence, but websites go stale and a mention says nothing about how good the list is.
• Verified — a person confirmed the non-alcoholic offering described on this page is real, from the venue's own menu or by contacting them directly. This is the only claim the Verified badge makes.

Between them, 252 of 339 listings now carry at least one independent signal — 136 corroborated by Google's drink data and 211 publishing non-alcoholic options on their own website. Only 14 have had someone actually speak to them, and we would rather show you that gap than let the weaker checks pass for the stronger one.

Running that cross-check found 136 venues where Google agrees no alcohol is served — and 25 where it disagreed with us. Those had been listed as alcohol-free when Google's data says they serve beer or wine. We have downgraded all 25 to sober-friendly and flagged them for a call rather than leave the stronger claim standing. Telling someone protecting their sobriety that a venue is alcohol-free when it isn't is the worst mistake this directory could make, so we would rather show you that we got it wrong than quietly correct it.

Of 339 listings, 329 have a confirmed business listing and 14 carry the Verified badge. The gap between those numbers is work we haven't finished, and we'd rather show it than blur the two together — an automated existence check is not the same as someone confirming there's something good to drink, and treating it as one would make the badge meaningless exactly where it matters most.

We wrote up that audit in full — what we checked, where we were wrong, and how to check a venue yourself: We checked 339 "alcohol-free" venues and 25 served alcohol.

Unverified listings

Listings without the badge haven't been confirmed by us yet. They're usually places we've found through public sources and haven't finished checking. We show them because an incomplete map is more useful than an empty one — but we label them honestly rather than implying a check we haven't done, and we deliberately keep them out of search results until the details are confirmed.

Right now 14 of 339 listings are verified, and 320 are complete enough to stand on their own. We'd rather publish that number than round it up.

Our alcohol policy labels

The policy label is the most important thing on a listing, and the distinction between them matters a great deal to some readers:

• Fully Drink-Free — no alcohol is served anywhere on the premises. This is the strictest label and the one we're most careful with.
• Mocktail Menu — alcohol is served, but there's a genuine, dedicated non-alcoholic drinks program.
• Sober-Friendly — alcohol is served and there's no dedicated N/A menu, but the venue is a comfortable place not to drink.

If you're avoiding alcohol entirely, the Fully Drink-Free filter is the one to trust — and it's worth calling ahead regardless, because we would always rather you double-check than rely on us alone.

Two ways a listing gets verified

The badge means the same thing either way — someone confirmed the non-alcoholic offering is real — but the evidence differs, and every venue page says which:

• From the venue's own published statement. Some venues say plainly on their own site that they serve no alcohol. Where we've found that, the listing records the page it came from and the exact sentence we relied on, so you can check our work.
• By contacting them. Someone asked what's actually poured. This is the stronger of the two, because a website can be years out of date and a phone call can't be.

We deliberately do not verify a mocktail programme this way. A menu listing non-alcoholic drinks tells you they exist, not whether they're any good or whether the venue is alcohol-free — and an early version of this check happily accepted a student-discount footnote and a "Low ABV" cocktail list as proof. Only an explicit, unambiguous statement counts, which is why the number is small.

What community reports do

Every venue page has a report form. Those reports are not verification — one stranger saying a bar is dry is a single unconfirmed claim, and the person most motivated to file one is the owner. What we do with them depends entirely on which direction they point:

• A report that a venue serves alcohol is applied straight away. It makes our claim weaker, and the worst case is that we under-promise and send you somewhere safer than advertised.
• A report that a venue is fully alcohol-free is not. It makes our claim stronger, and being wrong in that direction sends someone protecting their sobriety into a bar. Those need several independent reports that agree, plus corroboration from business data, before we'll change anything — and even then the listing stays unverified until a person has spoken to the venue.

That asymmetry is deliberate. It means bad information can make our listings more cautious automatically, but never less.

Tell us when we're wrong

We will get things wrong. Venues close, policies change, and public data goes stale. If a listing is inaccurate, tell us and we'll correct or remove it — corrections are the fastest way this directory gets better.

Submit a correction or email submit@themocktailguide.com.

A note on recovery

This is a directory of places, not a health resource, and nothing here is medical advice. If you're worried about your drinking, a doctor or a recovery service will help you far more than a list of bars can. Stopping suddenly after heavy, sustained drinking can be medically dangerous and is worth doing with professional support.