ARCO Cocktail Lounge + Coastal Fare

The stretch of Bay Street above Factor's Walk is one of the oldest built environments in Savannah, and ARCO occupies a Victorian building from 1860 on the river side of it. You come through an arched doorway into a room defined by its structure — soaring brick arches and vaults framing the water — which is where the name comes from. It is the most recent opening from the Ele & the Chef restaurant collection, and the food is coastal: seafood-forward, hyper-local, deliberately pared back.

What earns it a listing here is the shape of the drinks menu rather than any single drink. ARCO sorts its cocktails into four named categories — Classics, Signature, Light and Moderate, and Non-Alcoholic — which is a more useful structure than most bars manage. The Light and Moderate tier matters as much as the zero-proof one: it gives a drinker who is cutting down, rather than stopping, somewhere to land that is not a compromise between a full-strength cocktail and a soda. Savannah's tourism board picked the room out for exactly this, and named the Hudson Express, a build of pineapple, orange, coconut water, orgeat and fresh citrus, among its zero-proof drinks.

A caveat this listing carries deliberately: ARCO's cocktail card is published as an image dated 2026 and its individual drink names could not be read from a live text menu at the time of writing, so no signature drinks are recorded here. The evidence for the section itself is solid and comes from three independent sources — the tourism board, the Savannah Chamber listing and the venue's own published menu structure — but the specific names are the kind of thing that rotates, and this directory does not publish a drink it has not seen on a current menu.

One practical note: the lounge is closed Monday to Wednesday and does not open before 4pm on the days it trades, so it is a Thursday-to-Sunday proposition rather than a reliable weeknight stop.

It is worth saying plainly why the four-category structure is the thing being recommended here. Most bars that claim to look after non-drinkers keep one or two mocktails at the foot of a list and rebuild them whenever the menu turns over. A named category commits the bar to filling it every time the card is reprinted, and a Light and Moderate tier alongside it commits to the much larger group of people who are drinking less rather than not at all. ARCO is the only room in this guide that has formalised both.