Realm of the 52 Remedies

Realm of the 52 Remedies sits on Convoy Street in Kearny Mesa, the centre of San Diego's Asian food scene, and is entered through what presents itself as an apothecary. The name comes from the Wushi'er Bingfang, a Chinese medical text from around 215 BCE recovered from the Mawangdui tombs, which lists more than 250 elixirs and treatments; the bar describes itself as paying tribute to traditional methods of building health and longevity, and the drinks are presented as remedies.

The thing that matters for a non-drinker is structural rather than decorative. Each signature cocktail on the seasonal list is printed at twenty dollars with a line underneath reading that it is available spirit free at fifteen. That is not a short mocktail section bolted to the end of the menu — it is an offer to rebuild the bar's actual cocktails without the alcohol, across the list. On the spring and summer cards that has included the Sunomono, the bar's take on an old fashioned built around matsutake shoyu, shiso and plum vinegar, sesame and cucumber; the Je Ju, inspired by the mandarins of the Korean island, with ginger, cinnamon, mandarin and lemon; and Softly Spoken, built on mango, lime, orange and Chinese five spice and described by the bar as its most tropical drink.

Be clear about what the spirit-free versions are: the bar does not publish a separate ingredient list for them, so what arrives is the kitchen's rebuild of that drink without its spirit, at a five-dollar discount. Ask at the bar which of the current list they think works best without alcohol — the flavour-led drinks built on vinegar, tea and fruit lose less than the whisky-forward ones.

The room is small, dark and reservation-friendly, and the theming is committed. Hours run from five every night, until midnight Sunday through Thursday and half past one on Friday and Saturday. The list is seasonal and changes several times a year, so the named drinks above are examples of the form rather than fixtures.

The theming is unusually complete for a bar that could have coasted on a hidden door. The original manuscript the bar is named for sits in the Hunan Provincial Museum in Changsha, and the menu presents drinks the way the text presents treatments — tonics, tinctures, serums, potions and elixirs, each with a written intention and a garnish chosen to match. For a non-drinker this turns out to matter more than it sounds: a bar that has already decided its drinks are about botanicals, bitterness and infusion rather than about alcohol is a bar where removing the spirit costs the drink less than it would elsewhere. Convoy Street is a fifteen-minute drive from downtown and parking is straightforward, which is not true of most of this city's better cocktail bars.