Kinda Tropical

Kinda Tropical is an all-day cafe and bar in a renovated gas station at 3501 East 7th Street, with a large dog-friendly patio set under a red oak and screened from the road by vines and planting. The kitchen runs pulled barbecue jackfruit sandwiches, yucca fries, big salads and chicken sandwiches, with espresso and oat milk lattes on tap and Figure 8 coffee; vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options run right through the menu rather than sitting in a corner of it.

Visit Austin's assessment is that Kinda Tropical keeps one of the deepest non-alcoholic drink lists in the city, singling out a jalapeño pineapple margarita and the Rosemary Lane. Depth is the operative word: plenty of Austin bars have two or three zero-proof options, and a list long enough to choose from by mood rather than by availability is rare.

The jalapeño pineapple margarita is a good illustration of why the drinks work. Capsaicin heat and pineapple acidity between them occupy the space a spirit would — the heat gives the drink a finish and a slight burn, the acid keeps it from reading as juice. That is a structural solution rather than a sweetener, and it is why the drink holds up against the food instead of competing with it.

The format is the other half of the appeal. Open daily from 11am to midnight, part cafe and part bar, it changes character across the day without ever becoming a room organised around drinking. You can work there in the afternoon and stay into the evening, and the patio is quiet enough to talk on — which, on a stretch of East 7th that gets loud after dark, is a genuinely useful thing to know.

It does not feel like a bar in the conventional sense, and for a lot of people not drinking that is precisely the recommendation.