Kingfisher

Kingfisher opened in 2019 in a basement space on East Chapel Hill Street and quickly became one of the most talked-about bars in Durham — a ground-to-glass programme built on North Carolina and Southern flavours, house-made syrups and a heavily designed room. Discover Durham lists it on the city's official non-alcoholic page for cocktails with layers of flavour, house syrups, fresh ingredients and proper presentation, which reflects how the bar approaches zero-proof drinks generally rather than any one fixed list.

From April through September the bar also operates Roadrunner, a retro camper parked in the patio garden behind the building, open Thursday to Saturday evenings. Roadrunner runs its own shorter menu, and while it is trading it is the list the bar publishes: two named mocktails — the Meteor Smash on mango and orange, and the Milky Way on dark chocolate milk with nutmeg and caramel, each nine dollars — plus Heineken 0.0. Both mocktails are the zero-proof versions of full-strength drinks on the same list.

This is a bar where asking is worth more than reading. The seasonal cocktail list changes regularly and the bartenders build off-menu non-alcoholic drinks from the same syrups and infusions that go into everything else, which is exactly the capability Discover Durham is pointing at. What is published at any moment understates what the bar can make.

Two things worth knowing. Roadrunner is a concept within Kingfisher rather than a separate venue, so a search for it will lead you here — same address, same building. And the only other named non-alcoholic drink you will find in older writing about this bar, "Hot Thyme in the Summertime", dates from the 2019 opening menu and has not been on the list for years.