Last Rites

Last Rites is a "Polynesian Noir" tiki bar that opened in 2018 at 718 14th Street in Duboce Triangle. The room is built as a narrative set piece: a crashed aeroplane in the jungle, with a real fuselage forming the bar, banyan roots overhead, stone booths, fire-breathing skull idols, and periodic fog and storm effects. The drinks programme is deliberately grown-up for the genre — a rum list running past 150 bottles, and builds that avoid the blue-curaçao shorthand tiki often falls back on. It opens at 5pm most nights and runs to 2am on Fridays and Saturdays, and Wednesday bingo is a long-standing local fixture.

What makes it useful to a non-drinker is that the theatre is not reserved for the alcoholic menu. Last Rites prints five named zero-proof cocktails on its main menu at $14 each, on the same page and in the same presentation as everything else, and three of them are built on non-alcoholic base spirits rather than juice alone. The current list runs: Golden Idol (turmeric milk, coconut, orange, pineapple, lemon and nutmeg); Glass Ruby (grapefruit, lime, blueberry grenadine, cinnamon and ginger); Mocking Bird (Pathfinder non-alcoholic spirit and the bar's own no-ABV cask spirit, salted molasses, lime, pineapple, cane syrup and Last Rites salt); Wrong Island (LR N/A Cask Spirit, house cola syrup, lime and soda); and El Peligosto (LR N/A Cane Spirit, lime, cane sugar, saline and shishito pepper). The house "LR N/A Cask Spirit" and "N/A Cane Spirit" are made in-house specifically to give the alcohol-free builds the weight and length that tiki drinks normally take from aged rum, which is why these read as cocktails rather than as punch. The Golden Idol and the Glass Ruby are also listed with an optional spirit added for $3, so a table can order the same drink in both directions without anyone having to read from a different menu — a small piece of menu design that does more for a mixed group than most dedicated mocktail lists.