ALO Cafe Hawaii

ALO Cafe Hawaii started in Waikīkī in 2021 as a plant-focused café and has since grown to three Honolulu locations: the original at 159 Kaiulani Avenue, a Kakaʻako room on Auahi Street, and a downtown site on Bishop Street. Nothing on the premises contains alcohol. The menu is built around açaí bowls, smoothies and plant-based plates, with the drinks given more attention than the format usually implies — matcha is whisked to order rather than poured from a pre-mixed bottle, the smoothies use fresh organic fruit, and the house Aloha Matcha Latte is the drink the café is best known for.

Its value in this guide is largely geographic. Waikīkī is where most visitors to Oʻahu actually stay, and it is close to the worst-served district on the island for anyone not drinking: the beachfront is wall-to-wall hotel bars and resort restaurants, where the non-alcoholic option is typically a pineapple juice with an umbrella in it and the price of a cocktail. Of the twenty venues in this guide, only three sit inside Waikīkī proper with anything resembling a real non-alcoholic drinks list, and ALO Cafe is the only one of those where alcohol is absent altogether. That makes it a practical daytime anchor — somewhere to start a morning or break an afternoon without negotiating a bar. The trade-off is the obvious one: this is a café, and it closes at 7pm. It does not replace an evening out, and nobody should arrive expecting a zero-proof cocktail programme. What it offers is a room in the middle of the most tourist-dense square mile in Hawaiʻi where a person who does not drink orders exactly like everybody else in the queue, which in Waikīkī is rarer than it should be.