Kan-Kan Cinema & Brasserie

Kan-Kan opened on 20 August 2021 at 1258 Windsor Street, on a residential corner of the Near Eastside neighbourhood of Windsor Park, and is a genuinely unusual building: a nonprofit arthouse cinema with several screens, wrapped around a full-service brasserie and bar. The food operation was built under Abbi Merriss, a five-time James Beard Award nominee who also runs the kitchen at Bluebeard, and the beverage program is overseen by Dimitri Morris. The cocktail list is long and specific — a Hollywood Boulevardier on Backbone bourbon, a gin-based 35MM with orgeat and lime — and it is on that same list that the non-alcoholic drinks appear.

Indianapolis Monthly's review is the useful citation here, because it assessed the mocktails against the cocktails rather than mentioning them in passing, and found them equally well made. The Rupert Holmes is the one it named: coconut, lime and orange whipped frothy and lengthened with pineapple soda, which is a piña-colada reference that stops short of being sweet. The zero-proof section rotates seasonally, so the specific drinks change through the year; what stays constant is that they are built rather than poured.

The reason to send a non-drinker here specifically, though, is structural rather than liquid. Almost every good zero-proof list in Indianapolis is inside a bar, which means the evening is still shaped around a bar. Kan-Kan is shaped around a film — you can arrive at 5pm, eat in the brasserie, and be in a cinema by 7pm with a mocktail you actually chose. That makes it one of the better sober date-night options in the city, and it is a short drive from 8th Day Distillery in the Circle City Industrial Complex if you want a drink first. The bar opens at 4pm and the restaurant at 5pm daily; screenings run from thirty minutes after the cinema doors open.