Lucky Belly

Lucky Belly has traded at 50 North Hotel Street since the early 2010s and was one of the restaurants that turned Chinatown from a district people avoided after dark into the centre of Honolulu's independent food scene. The kitchen is built around ramen and Asian fusion, the room is small and dark, and the bar has always been taken more seriously than a noodle house strictly requires.

That shows in the non-alcoholic list, which is more interesting than most dedicated cocktail bars manage. The Chinatown Swizzle is the standout and the one worth ordering: galangal, kaffir lime and lemongrass — the aromatic base of a great deal of South-East Asian cooking — combined with drinking vinegar and coconut water. Drinking vinegar is the same principle as the shrub used up at SKY Waikīkī, and it does the same job of supplying sharpness, but here it is set against savoury, resinous aromatics rather than fruit, which produces something genuinely unlike a soft drink. Galangal in particular is sharper and more medicinal than ginger, and it gives the drink a bitterness that has nothing to do with sugar. The Liliko'i Fizz works the sweeter side, with passionfruit purée against spiced almond syrup, fresh mint and club soda, and a hibiscus lemonade covers the simplest case. The pricing is the other thing worth noting: these have historically run around $5, roughly a third of what a cocktail costs, which is the opposite of the usual hotel-bar practice of charging cocktail prices for a drink with the expensive ingredient removed. Chinatown puts the restaurant within a couple of blocks of both Senia and The Pig & The Lady, and a short walk from Yours Truly on Bishop Street, which makes the downtown grid the densest concentration of decent non-alcoholic drinking in the city.