Housemade pineapple, citrus & fresh mint — All Spice San Mateo
All Spice in San Mateo is chef Han Ly Hwang's quietly acclaimed fine-dining restaurant — a 36-seat room where French classical technique meets Vietnamese, Indian, and Japanese pantry ingredients. The kitchen's approach to its zero-proof Craft Mocktails list mirrors its food philosophy: seasonal, precise, and built from scratch. The housemade pineapple-citrus-mint cooler is the essential summer drink — whole pineapple juiced in-house (not from concentrate), brightened with whatever citrus is peak season, and finished with fresh mint. At $10 on a menu where wine pours start at $11, it signals that the restaurant takes non-alcoholic hospitality as seriously as everything else. A drink that reminds you that 'housemade' and 'fine dining' should mean the same thing.
Use the ripest pineapple you can find — the sweeter the fruit, the less syrup you need. Cold-press juicers extract more flavour from pineapple than centrifugal ones. Balance is the key: the mint should be present but not dominant, and the citrus should cut through the pineapple's sweetness without sourness. Taste as you go.
All Spice in San Mateo is a long-standing Bay Area favourite that has elevated South Asian fine dining for over a decade. The mocktail programme reflects the kitchen's philosophy — premium non-alcoholic ingredients (adaptogens, botanical sodas, house-crafted shrubs) in recipes that are as carefully considered as anything on the cocktail list. A model for how a serious restaurant handles zero-proof drinks.
Visit allspicerestaurant.com