Moona Moono

Uptown's Hennepin Avenue has lost a lot of its old bar strip over the past decade, and Moona Moono opened into that gap at the corner of Hennepin and 31st with a hybrid format: a coffee, matcha and boba counter at the front, and a retail floor of Asian and Asian-American goods behind it — Korean skincare, stationery, ceramics, kids' books and toys, blind boxes. The shop celebrates Asian and Asian American culture explicitly, and the room is light and glassy rather than dark. It is graded here as a modest non-alcoholic offering rather than a strong one for two honest reasons: it closes at 6pm most days, and it stocks a small number of Japanese beers, so it is not an alcohol-free space.

What earns it the entry is that the non-alcoholic side is deliberate rather than incidental. The shop keeps cans of Ghia — the botanical non-alcoholic aperitif built on gentian, yuzu, elderflower and fig — priced at $7, which puts a genuine bitter aperitif in a room where the alternative would be a soft drink. A salted yuzu soda sits alongside it, and the tea programme runs matcha lattes, black tea and flavour builds including a yuzu strawberry. The other half of the argument is programming: mahjong nights, silent book clubs, lo-fi craft nights and body-doubling sessions for people who want company while they work. A sober restaurant critic writing for Beyond Beurre Blanc in January 2026 put it on a list of the nine best places to go drinking in the Twin Cities without drinking, on exactly that basis — "for folks who really just don't want to be in a bar, this is the spot!" That is the use case: an evening out of the house, in a room with a social structure to it, where nothing on the table has to contain alcohol. Thursday is the one late night, running to 8pm.