Meteor

Meteor occupies a stretch of North 2nd Street in Hawthorne that had held a dive bar for decades, and co-owners Elliot Manthey and Robb Jones kept the bones of the room while rebuilding what came across the bar. The result has been one of the more improbable success stories in Twin Cities drinking: a neighbourhood bar in North Minneapolis, serving hot dogs, that was named a 2024 James Beard Award semifinalist in the Outstanding Bar category, carries an Excellent rating from the Pinnacle Guide, and appears in the World's 50 Best Discovery listing. The stated intention was a bar that would serve top-tier drinks to anyone who walked in regardless of background, and the room reflects it — this is not a reservations-and-velvet-rope cocktail bar.

For a non-drinker the relevant fact is what that bar team does with the constraint. The seasonal cocktail list runs through spirits most bars leave alone — mezcal, aquavit — and rotates several times a year, and the non-alcoholic drinks rotate with it rather than sitting frozen at the bottom of the page. Explore Minnesota's guide to non-alcoholic drinking in the state singles Meteor out for its zero-proof work and names a wild rice horchata: horchata rebuilt on manoomin, the wild rice that grows in Minnesota's shallow lakes and carries a nutty, toasted character that rice horchata does not, which makes it a genuinely regional non-alcoholic drink rather than a borrowed one. Beyond that named build, the list carries seasonal zero-proof specials and low-ABV drinks. This is a licensed bar with a full spirits programme and it is graded accordingly — a real but modest non-alcoholic offering rather than a designed parallel menu — but it is the only entry on this page in North Minneapolis, and the hours are the widest here: 2am on Wednesday through Saturday, midnight otherwise, closed Tuesday.