Hello, Marjorie

Hello, Marjorie is in the old Register & Tribune building on Locust Street, and the room is done as a stylish living room from several decades ago — low light, deep seating, the kind of place designed to keep you for three hours. Its alcohol-free list is the best in Des Moines, and the reason is technique rather than stock.

Look at the G&T specification: Seedlip Spice 94, a house-made tonic, spiced pear, clarified lime and soda water. Two of those five components are labour. A house tonic means making cinchona syrup rather than opening a bottle. Clarified lime means running citrus juice through a milk or agar clarification to strip the cloudiness and soften the acid while keeping the aroma — a process that takes hours and that most bars will not undertake for their alcoholic cocktails, let alone a drink for someone not drinking. Seedlip Spice 94 is the allspice-and-cardamom expression, which is the right one to pair with pear.

The Amaretto Stone Sour is the other documented build and it goes the opposite direction: N/A amaretto and N/A rum together with orange, lemon, cinnamon and orgeat, which is a rich, nutty, almost dessert-adjacent drink. Between the two, the bar covers both ends of what a non-drinker might want on a given night, which very few venues in this directory manage.

The list rotates, which is why only these two are recorded — Des Moines' tourism board documented them in January 2026 and the rest of the menu will have turned over since. The rotation is itself the signal: a static pair of mocktails is a decision made once, a rotating list is a decision made every season.

Open 4pm to midnight Monday through Thursday and 4pm to 1am on Friday and Saturday. Closed Sunday. It sits a couple of blocks from In Confidence and Revival House, which makes downtown Des Moines walkable for an evening built this way.

A caution that belongs in this city guide somewhere visible, and this is the entry to carry it. Des Moines' own tourism board published its round-up of the best mocktails in the metro on 5 January 2026, and two of the venues it recommends are permanently closed as of August 2026: Louie's Wine Dive and 503 Cocktail Lab. That is less a criticism of the guide than a measure of how fast this category moves — seven months was long enough for a fifth of a city's recommended list to disappear. Check before travelling, here and everywhere.