The Pig & The Lady

The Pig & The Lady started as a stall at Honolulu's farmers markets, run by the Le family from their own Vietnamese recipes, and grew into one of the most decorated restaurants in Hawaiʻi. It spent years at 83 North King Street in Chinatown, and that address is the one most guides and listings still carry — but the Chinatown room is closed, and the restaurant now operates from Suite 120 at 3650 Waialae Avenue in Kaimukī. Anyone working from an older listing will find the wrong door. The move puts it a few steps from Vintage Books at 3660 Waialae, which means the two most interesting non-alcoholic offerings in Kaimukī are now next to each other, with Leahi Health a short walk away on the same avenue.

Its non-alcoholic drink is a single house build combining pineapple, kaffir lime and black pepper, and the composition says something about how the kitchen thinks. Pineapple is the obvious local sweetener and the base of half the zero-proof drinks in this guide; what is done with it here is not obvious. Kaffir lime leaf is intensely aromatic and faintly bitter, quite unlike lime juice, and it is one of the defining smells of South-East Asian cooking. Black pepper adds a dry, prickling heat at the back of the palate. The result is savoury and aromatic rather than sweet, built from the aromatics already on the stove rather than from a bar syrup — the same instinct that produces Lucky Belly's galangal-and-lemongrass swizzle. Two honest limitations. The drink is not named in any published source, so it is recorded here by its ingredients; inventing a name would make the listing look tidier and be false. And it is one drink rather than a programme, which is why the entry sits at a three. What the restaurant offers a non-drinker is a considered option at a table worth sitting at, rather than a list to work through.