The question rarely gets asked directly. More often it's implied — a pause before ordering, a slight apology in the voice, the soda water arriving in a rocks glass as though to pass for something else. But the non-drinker at the bar is navigating something real, and it isn't a dietary restriction. It's a social geometry problem.
A bar is designed, physically and economically, around alcohol. The stool, the glass, the bartender's attention — all of it is organised around the transaction of a drink. When you sit down without intending to make that transaction in the usual way, you are still a guest, but you have stepped slightly sideways from the room's assumptions. How the room responds to that is worth paying attention to.
A good bartender doesn't flinch. They don't upsell you on a mocktail list they're visibly embarrassed by, and they don't treat your order as a problem to be routed around. They pour whatever you're having — tonic, juice, something built with a little attention — and move on, because the job is hospitality, not inventory management. The glass matters more than what's in it. Being brought something in a considered glass, set down without ceremony, tells you the bar knows what it's doing.
A bad room reveals itself quickly. The sigh that isn't quite a sigh. The paper cup when everyone else has a proper glass. The perfunctory "we have Coke" delivered with the affect of someone reading from a list of options they'd rather not be offering. What the bar does with the non-drinking order is honest information about how the room treats people it hasn't fully accounted for.
None of this is about the mocktail question, which has become its own minor industry and earns its own scepticism. A bar that has spent thought on something interesting without alcohol is not performing virtue — it's doing the same thing a good spirits programme does, which is thinking about flavour in a room where thinking about flavour is the whole point. Whether that appeals to you is between you and your evening.
What matters is simpler: you are allowed to sit at a bar and not drink alcohol, and the bar's job is to give you somewhere to be, not to make you justify your presence. The soda water with a wedge of lime is not a consolation prize. The bartender who handles it without drama is telling you something about the room's actual character — which is more useful information than any list of house signatures taped to the back of the menu.
Occupy the stool. Order what you want. Watch how the room treats the question.