Hai Hai

Hai Hai is chef and co-owner Christina Nguyen's Southeast Asian street-food restaurant in Northeast Minneapolis, opened in 2017 with business partner Birk Grudem in the former 22nd Avenue Station dive bar — the name nods to "twenty-two" in Vietnamese. In 2024 Nguyen won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest, becoming the first Vietnamese woman to take a Beard cooking medal, and the restaurant had already been named among the best new restaurants in the country by Eater, Thrillist and Esquire.

The bar is known for tropical craft cocktails, and the spirit-free offering follows the same pantry rather than departing from it. The zero-proof trio is named for Vietnamese numerals — Mot, Hai and Ba, meaning one, two and three — and the drinks are built on house-made cordials and shrubs drawn from the kitchen's own ingredients: lychee, jackfruit, guava, grapefruit, rhubarb, strawberry and ginger. That last point is the thing worth understanding about why these work. A shrub is a vinegar-based syrup, and vinegar is one of the few ways to get genuine sharpness and length into a drink without alcohol; a kitchen already making cordials and shrubs for its cocktails can produce non-alcoholic drinks with real structure at almost no extra cost. It is why restaurant bars with strong pantries tend to beat dedicated cocktail bars at zero-proof.

Three named builds is a focused list rather than an exhaustive one, and it is honest to say so — this is not a venue with a dozen spirit-free options. But they are made rather than opened, they change with the fruit, and they are designed to stand up to food that runs hot, sour and herbaceous. Reservations go through Resy, walk-ins are welcome, and the restaurant serves Tuesday through Sunday, closed Mondays.