Sunny's

Sunny's began as a pandemic-era outdoor pop-up and opened permanently in Little River in October 2024, from co-owners Will Thompson and Carey Hynes — the team behind Jaguar Sun — with Aaron Brooks, formerly of the Four Seasons, as executive chef. It landed in the MICHELIN Guide quickly. The 13,000-square-foot site runs from chandelier-lit indoor rooms to a courtyard shaded by a banyan tree, with two bars.

A steakhouse is among the hardest rooms in which to not drink. The format is built around big red wine and brown spirits, the meal is long, and the non-drinker spends two hours watching a bottle get poured. Sunny's answer is a named Cold Sober menu, priced around fourteen to eighteen dollars, built on real zero-proof products and house ingredients rather than juice.

The range is unusually wide. The Chickadee uses non-alcoholic Lucano with grapefruit, passion fruit, mace and lime. The Sanbitter Spritz is built on Sanbitter, the zero-proof Campari soda, with cucumber, strawberry and lemon. The Golden Spritz uses Martini Floreale with Mt. Olympus tea, citrus and bubbles. The Annabel Lee works watermelon and pineapple against lime, champagne vinegar and a house habanero syrup — vinegar and chilli rather than sugar, which is what lets a drink stand up to a steak.

Four drinks across four different non-alcoholic bases, several of them bitter or savoury, is a properly considered list. Bitterness is the quality most often missing from zero-proof menus and the one that makes a drink work alongside rich food.

It is a full-service restaurant with two bars and a wine programme, not an alcohol-free venue — but the Cold Sober list means the meal works either way. The courtyard under the banyan is the seat worth asking for, and the Cold Sober list runs at both bars.