Sunken Harbor Club

Sunken Harbor Club occupies the second floor above Gage & Tollner, the restored 19th-century dining room on Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn, and it opened in October 2021. It is a tiki bar in the serious sense — immersive, tropical, and run by Garret Richard, whose title of Chief Cocktail Officer undersells his standing as one of the most technically respected practitioners of the style in the country. A second location opened in Bermuda in September 2022.

It earns its place here by winning its category at the inaugural NYC's Best Bars for NA Awards, judged in 2025 and covered by Time Out, specifically for its tiki-style non-alcoholic drinks.

That award is worth explaining, because tiki is arguably the hardest cocktail family to build without alcohol. The style depends on rum — not just for strength but for weight, funk and the particular way aged spirit carries spice and citrus. Strip that out and most attempts collapse into fruit punch. Doing it properly means rebuilding the missing structure from elsewhere: house syrups carrying real spice, acid balanced by hand rather than borrowed from a bottled mix, tea and bitter elements standing in for the tannin and burn that alcohol supplied. A bar that has been recognised specifically for tiki without alcohol has done that work rather than bought a non-alcoholic rum and hoped.

Be clear about what this is: Sunken Harbor Club is a full cocktail bar and serves alcohol. It is on this list because if you are not drinking and you want the best possible version of a tropical drink in New York, this is where the craft is — not because you can drink here without encountering alcohol.

The practical details favour an evening rather than a late night: doors at 5pm, closing at 11pm Sunday through Thursday and midnight on Friday and Saturday. The room is upstairs and intimate, so it fills; going early is the reliable move. For anyone building a Brooklyn evening around this guide, it sits within easy reach of Downtown Brooklyn's transit hub, which makes it one of the simpler venues here to reach from anywhere in the city.