The Moon's Daughters

The Moon's Daughters occupies the rooftop of the Thompson Hotel on Lexington Avenue, twenty floors up, with the widest view of downtown San Antonio and the river below. The design leans celestial and the room is built for sunset.

Rooftop bars are, as a category, the hardest places to be the person not drinking. The entire experience is constructed around holding a cocktail while the light changes; there is no food to focus on, no game to play, nothing else to do with your hands. When the only alcohol-free option is a soda, the gap between your evening and everybody else's is at its most visible.

That is why the two named drinks matter more here than the same two would in a restaurant. Pluto's Revenge and Feeling Prickly are on the menu as drinks, with names, in the same list as everything else — so ordering one is a choice rather than an admission. Feeling Prickly uses prickly pear, which recurs across San Antonio's better zero-proof menus and belongs to the landscape rather than being imported for colour; it is tart, intensely magenta and looks exactly as good as anything with tequila in it, which on a rooftop is not a trivial consideration.

The hours are remarkable and worth knowing: 7am to midnight most days, to 2am on Friday and Saturday. A rooftop serving from seven in the morning means coffee with the view is an option too, and the 2am close makes it one of the few places in the city where a non-drinker can still be out very late with something decent. Being in the Thompson puts it within a short walk of the Pearl and most of downtown. It is the single best view a non-drinker can get in this city with a proper drink in hand, which is not a small thing on a hot evening.