Rigo

Rigo occupies 885 Kapahulu Avenue, on the corridor that runs inland from Waikīkī towards Kaimukī and holds a disproportionate share of Honolulu's good independent restaurants. The kitchen works a Spanish-Italian brief — tapas, wood-fired pizza, house-made pasta and smoky grill plates — describing itself as Mediterranean classics with a Hawaiian spirit. One naming note for anyone searching: the restaurant trades as Rigo, or Rigo Spanish Italian, and several older listings and articles still call it Rigo's. The possessive is not current.

Its non-alcoholic contribution is a single documented drink, That Cucumber Thing, and it is worth more than its simplicity suggests. Cucumber, mint, lime and soda is about as spare as a built drink gets, but the profile it produces — vegetal, cool, herbaceous, with almost no sugar — is close to absent from the rest of this guide. Honolulu's zero-proof drinks lean overwhelmingly on tropical fruit: pineapple, passionfruit, lychee, guava, hibiscus. Those are local, they are excellent, and they bring real acidity, but they are also all sweet, and a visitor working through the city's non-alcoholic lists ends up drinking a lot of sugar. A cucumber-and-mint build is the natural counterweight, and it is specifically what you want alongside salty, oily Mediterranean food — jamón, anchovy, blistered pizza crust — where a sweet drink actively fights the plate. That pairing logic is the same reason a dry sherry or a vinho verde works with tapas, and it is a genuine piece of thinking about what a non-drinker should be given with this particular menu rather than a default. The rest of the offer is standard soft drinks, which is why the venue sits at a three. Opening hours are limited and split across lunch and dinner services, so checking before travelling is sensible.