As these nights tend to begin, I was sitting in a bar. It was Halloween weekend, and all the requisite signs of revelry were around me, including across the room, where a woman with long blonde hair was throwing herself into a rendition of “ Hand in My Pocket ” by Alanis Morissette. Arriving at the verse where Alanis sings “I feel drunk but I’m sober,” she twisted the lyrics ever-so-slightly. “BUT I’M FUCKING SOBER,” she screamed joyously.

Her dream may seem an irregularity, but Listen—which also hosted a Dry January happy hour series at Von Bar in NoHo—is one of three alcohol-free bars coming to New York City in the next year. Getaway Bar in Greenpoint and karaoke bar Mini Rex in the Lower East Side—a divided concept with a booze-stocked bar in one room and a sober bar in another—both have plans to open in the first quarter of 2019. Each is slightly different, but looked at collectively, they signal a possible reimagining of the role alcohol plays in our social lives, in our gathering spaces, and in our concepts of fun.

She continued: “When, on Saturday night, people were dancing on tables I just completely lost my mind, because that was the validation I had been looking for.”

“I want to bring a bit of ease into not drinking, because that is something I think that is missing from the experience,” Bandrovschi told me. “The other thing I want to bring is rowdiness and fun and the things that alcohol has claimed for its own, which I actually think are totally human things that we all have in us and we all want to express and release.”

Listen Bar’s founder Lorelei Bandrovschi was also elated—she had dreamed up the concept on a hunch that the free-wheeling fun of a bar on a lively weekend night could be captured without the booze, and as she saw it, the events of the night were proving her right.

Her adlib sparked uproarious cheers from onlookers, because she wasn’t the only one. The bar in front of me was fully stocked with non-intoxicating substances, and the expertly-mixed $11 cocktail I was sipping didn’t have a drop of alcohol in it. I was at a booze-free pop-up spot in New York City’s Williamsburg called Listen Bar —a four-day trial run for a permanent concept aiming to open in October of 2019, given it reaches its fundraising goal—and everyone around me (as far as I could tell) was stone-cold sober, and ecstatic to be so.

It also prompts us to wonder whether the spirit of bar-going—the lack of structure and glut of spontaneity that draws us to bars—is separable from the loosening properties of alcohol. I, a relatively new teetotaler, wondered as I sat there, sipping on some fennel-sage-tonic concoction, the lucid frenzy whirring around me: What makes a bar a bar?

Bars—specifically the booze-serving kind—have long played a vital role in American life as gathering spaces (and quite obviously, in the lives of many other groups of humans long before that). In colonial America, the tavern served the role of the ancient Greek agora—a public space where citizens came together to share ideas, iron out disputes, and even drum up revolution. They were so central to life that from those early days through westward expansion, settlers putting down roots in a new town would build a bar before any other structure, explained Christine Sismondo, a humanities lecturer at Toronto’s York University and author of America Walks into a Bar, which details the unique historical and cultural significance of the spaces.

“The American bar became such an institution,” Sismondo told MUNCHIES. “Every town built the bar first, so you would have at least one place to go, even if it was to settle legal disputes or sell your wares.”

These early American bars served more illustrious purposes as well—the American Revolution was conceived and discussed in taverns, leading the Green Dragon tavern in Boston to be dubbed the “Headquarters of the Revolution” by historians. Far from a fluke, argues Sismondo, revolutionaries would continue to incite change from bar stools, a more recent example being the Stonewall riots of 1969, made possible by the solidification of a gay community through clandestine bar meetings.

But how important was the format of the drinks served? It’s impossible to know, of course, how history may have been altered if the Green Dragon had served $11 alcohol-free cocktails instead of beer—one can imagine it would have closed swiftly, given what a ludicrous amount of money that would have been then—but Sismondo believes there is something to be said for the unifying nature of alcohol.

“Alcohol makes you sort of open up,” she said. “A lot of people think the reason humans as a social animal have managed to construct small groups that got along well together….they sort of fix that to the rise of beer.”

The argument is intuitive and commonplace: drinking lowers our inhibitions, relieves us of social anxiety and self-consciousness, and by extension facilitates bonding with fellow bar-goers. The breaking down of social barriers can make a bar a “magical” place, argues Sismondo.

Still, the ease and effectiveness of booze as a social lubricant is not an ironclad argument for its necessity in bringing humans together. It’s possible we’ve been socialized to believe alcohol is mandatory in social settings, that we’re doomed to flail awkwardly in conversation without it and, more to the point, that a nocturnal gathering space just won’t make room for fun and frivolity without its influence. Indeed, some would argue that our ancestors did us wrong, and we’ve been socialized to our detriment.

I have something of a personal stake in the booze-free bar gamble. I stopped drinking, at least for the foreseeable future, on New Year’s Day 2018—the date’s symbolic significance, bizarrely, a total coincidence—because alcohol seemed to be taking more from me than it was giving back. Giving it up has, for the most part, been a relief.

But it has also induced a sense of loss I can’t shake, and I’ve realized what I miss is not only booze but bars. I miss the ease of a bar, the walking in whenever and leaving whenever. I miss the invitation to leave your life at the door and the unknown on the other side—you never know who you’ll sit next to, who you’ll fall into conversation with, what serendipity might unfold. Sismondo, in our interview, noted the freewheeling nature of a bar that lent itself to moving in and out of conversations quickly, and the “leveling” nature that deterred drinkers from pulling rank during spirited discussions.

Now bars, spaces I once loved, are spaces that are no longer for me—they are spaces for people who drink. When I go to a bar, I am on the periphery, an observer of the shared activity and bonding ritual rather than a participant. Then there’s the social pressure to imbibe and the anxiety that comes with resisting that pressure. I worry over my demeanor when I decline booze—was I light enough, unbothered enough? I worry people will think I’m haughty or holier-than-thou. I often hope my glass of seltzer will be mistaken for a gin and tonic. In short, much of the ease that came with bar-going is gone for me—it went out the window when I gave up drinking.

The thing is, I had accepted all of this. Giving up a deeply ingrained habit means re-negotiating what your life looks like in the aftermath, without it, and it’s all but guaranteed that it will look different. Just as I’ve had to find new (healthier!) ways of managing my anxiety, I’ve had to find new ways of unwinding after work and new ways of socializing on weekends. And I’ve had to accept that something I once found solace in now a source of mild discomfort. I’ve found it’s best to recognize and accept the things I miss about drinking—to accept I may never stop missing them. The benefits of sobriety I’ve reaped over the last year far outweigh those lingering disappointments.

So I’ll admit I was cynical when I first discovered Listen Bar. I rolled my eyes at what I saw as an unnecessary attempt to make everything for everyone—bars are not made for non-drinkers, I thought, and that’s okay!

It hadn’t once occurred to me that it might be possible to take back any of the things I lost when I gave up drinking. It hadn’t occurred to me that some of the things I attributed to booze and booze alone could possibly exist elsewhere.

If you choose to look, there are a smattering of signs that American consumers are thirsty for more alcohol-free options, and are more open to the idea of turning traditionally debauched rituals on their heads than they might have been in the past. In New York, hundreds are already turning out for coffee and juice-fueled sober raves at 7 AM, taking a phenomenon synonymous with drug use and making it wholesome. Data shows Americans—in particular, millennials—are drinking less, and beverage companies are churning out zero-proof options in response. UK-based beverage company Seedlip has made a name for itself crafting non-intoxicating spirits with herbs and spices, and its popularity has caught on at traditional drinking establishments looking to ramp up their offerings for teetol patrons—Saxon + Parole, a Lower East Side eatery known for its cocktails, recently expanded its booze-free drinks menu to include intricate Seedlip cocktails, and the number of patrons ordering booze-free drinks has grown by about a quarter, according to bar director Maxime Belfand.

Bandrovschi is part a set of who wants us to believe that we can expand outside of our collective understanding of what a night out means.