Zunzibar

Zunzi's is a Savannah institution — a South African-influenced sandwich counter that grew a following long before the Historic District had a restaurant scene worth the name — and Zunzibar is the full-service bar and dining room that grew out of it on Drayton Street, where the historic grid meets the waterfront. It is a patio operation as much as an indoor one: shareable coastal plates, live music, dogs welcome, and a room that stays busy from lunch onwards.

The bar's alcohol-free drinking centres on one well-known build. The Pineapple Express is made with Ritual Zero Proof's non-alcoholic rum alternative, peach purée, pineapple, almond milk, cane sugar and lemon — a creamy, tropical drink that reads as a piña colada's more interesting relative. Staff have told Savannah Magazine it is the most-requested mocktail in the house, which for a room with this much foot traffic is a meaningful volume signal rather than a menu claim.

The grading here is deliberate. Zunzibar is recorded at three rather than four: the bar clearly makes alcohol-free drinks as a matter of routine and uses a real non-alcoholic spirit to do it, but there is no standing printed zero-proof section the way there is at Husk or Peregrin, and the current menu published on the venue's own site does not itemise the mocktails. The Pineapple Express is well enough sourced to describe; the rest of the list is not, and is not invented here.

What Zunzibar offers that most of this guide does not is timing. It opens at 11am seven days a week and runs to 11pm, or midnight Thursday through Saturday, so it covers the middle of the day when the city's better cocktail bars are still locked. There is also a Hilton Head Island location, which is closed; this listing is the Savannah restaurant only.