Mahina & Sun's

Mahina & Sun's occupies the ground floor of the Surfjack Hotel & Swim Club at 412 Lewers Street, a block back from Kalākaua Avenue in Waikīkī. The Surfjack is a mid-century motel reworked as a design hotel, and the restaurant reflects that: open to the courtyard and the pool, live music several nights a week, and a kitchen led by executive chef Erik Leong, who is Kānaka Maoli and cooks Hawaiian-inspired food from island producers. Service runs a lunch and lanai menu with happy hour from noon to 5.30pm and dinner from 5.30pm to 10pm, and it takes walk-ins.

The non-alcoholic list is the most interesting in Waikīkī and one of the two or three best in the city. Four drinks sit on it, and each solves a different problem. Mr Brightside is built on a turmeric shrub — vinegar-based, earthy and bitter — cut with lemonade and fresh mint, which gives it the sharpness and the slightly medicinal edge that a zero-proof drink usually lacks entirely. Limonata is the simplest, a creamy Brazilian limeade, and works as the crowd-pleaser. Tropic Thunder pairs kalamansi, the small sour citrus used across the Philippines and increasingly grown in Hawaiʻi, with lilikoʻi, doubling down on acidity rather than sugar. The one worth going for is The Pretender, a non-alcoholic twist on a penicillin. The penicillin is a modern classic built on blended Scotch, honey, lemon and ginger with a peated Islay float, and its defining characteristic is smoke — which is precisely the hardest thing to reproduce without whisky, because smoke in a cocktail normally arrives dissolved in alcohol. Attempting it at all signals a bar taking the format seriously rather than sweetening juice, and it is the closest thing Honolulu has to the kind of zero-proof cocktail programme that cities on the mainland now take for granted. For a visitor staying in Waikīkī who wants one proper drink and does not want alcohol, this is the booking.