Trick Dog

Trick Dog opened in 2013 at 3010 20th Street in the Mission and has spent the decade since as one of the most-copied cocktail bars in the world. Its defining trick is the menu itself: roughly every six months the team scraps the list and rebuilds it around an entirely new conceit, designing and printing the object from scratch, so that the menu functions as a piece of graphic design as much as a list of drinks. The bar has twice won World's Best Cocktail Menu and was named Best U.S. Cocktail Bar at the 2025 Spirited Awards. It opens at 4pm daily and runs to 2am on Fridays and Saturdays, and doubles as the waiting room for Flour + Water across the way, which is part of why it is consistently full.

Founder Josh Harris has been sober for years, and that shapes a non-alcoholic programme built on a specific and unusual principle: rather than grouping zero-proof drinks into a separate section at the back, Trick Dog folds them into the same menu sections as everything else, with the same invented names and the same design treatment. A non-drinker ordering here is not visibly ordering from a different list. Kane's December 2023 survey in The San Francisco Standard put the reasoning plainly, reporting that "for Josh Harris, the Mission hot spot's sober founder, it's important to integrate nonalcoholic drinks into the menu rather than isolate them as a standalone category." Because the whole list is rebuilt twice a year the specific drinks turn over, but past alcohol-free builds show the ambition: Puppy Pose, a creamy green milk punch made with wheatgrass, yogurt and non-alcoholic spirits, and the Wydah, which layers spirit alternatives including Ritual Tequila Alternative and Wilfred's aperitif. The practical consequence is that the zero-proof options should be treated as a guarantee of approach rather than a fixed menu to plan around — whatever the current theme, there will be drinks on it made without alcohol.