The Pour: Hunã Tiki Bar

Entry 5 is the one The Pour has been building toward. Not because Hunã Tiki Bar is the best cocktail bar in Washtenaw County — it isn't — but because it forces the series to answer a question it has been avoiding: what do you do with a bar that is unambiguously the best at something the other bars don't try to do?

The Zombie is the tell. Two per person, served in a skull mug with a limit that the menu enforces without apology. That limit isn't a novelty: it is the bar communicating, in the clearest possible language, that you ordered something designed to impair your judgment and they take that seriously. Not every bar would put a drink on the menu that comes with a legal disclaimer and a hard cap. Hunã did. That tells you something about the people running this program.

The Drink

The Zombie exists in tiki history as a problem drink. Don Beachcomber created it in the 1930s and reportedly refused to sell more than two per customer because of what happened when he did.^{1The Zombie's origin at Don the Beachcomber (Donn Beach) and the two-drink limit policy has been documented by tiki historians including Jeff Berry in Beachbum Berry's Sippin' Safari (2007).} Hunã serves it in a skull mug with a two-per-person limit and does not soften the history. The drink is dark rum, light rum, overproof rum, apricot liqueur, lime, grapefruit, falernum, grenadine, Angostura bitters, and absinthe. It tastes like fruit until it doesn't. The overproof finishes things.

If the Zombie is too much, the Strong Island is the drink I'd send someone back for. Gin, rum, vodka, lemon, cinnamon, curaçao, grapefruit soda, and bitters. The cinnamon gives it a warmth that tropical cocktails often skip in favor of sweetness. Two of them is an evening.

The Iguana is the one that surprised me on a third visit: gin, Midori, dry vermouth, green Chartreuse, and Salers aperitif. It is bitter and herbaceous in a way that tiki bars don't usually go. That a rum-forward tiki program can also make something like the Iguana without it feeling out of place is a sign that the menu has range, not just theme.

Cocktails run $14 to $19. Large-format shareable drinks exist for groups and are less expensive per serving than four individual orders. The non-alcoholic list is taken seriously, which matters more than cocktail bars usually acknowledge.

The Room

You enter off Washington Street, west of South Main. There is no sign. You go down a staircase.

The room at the bottom is 78 seats, bamboo walls, thatched ceiling panels, stone accents, and low enough lighting that your phone camera will have opinions about it. The bar runs along one wall. Booths handle groups. The aesthetic is committed: this is not a bar with a tiki theme, it is a tiki bar. The bamboo is real. The thatched elements look like someone cared about them. The greenery is in corners that were designed to hold greenery.

What Hunã gets right that other concept bars get wrong is that it does not wink. The room plays it straight. There is no ironic distance between the aesthetic and the experience. Going down that staircase, the bar has decided: you are in this. Either you're in or you should go somewhere else. That commitment is what separates a bar with a concept from a bar that is a concept.

Thursday through Saturday, 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. The Thursday crowd is lighter and louder in the good sense — groups that want to talk, not just be seen. Weekends fill up.

The Program

The organizing principle is rum, which in 2026 is a more serious subject than most cocktail drinkers give it credit for. Aged rum, overproof rum, agricole rum, rhum — the category has as much range as whiskey and gets a fraction of the reverence. Hunã's program is built on the premise that rum is worth paying attention to, and the menu teaches that case drink by drink.

The classic tiki canon is here (Mai Tais, Daiquiris, Zombies), but so are original constructions that borrow from other traditions. The Iguana is not a tiki drink by any definition. It sits on the menu because the bartenders know what they're doing with Chartreuse and aperitifs, and the program is confident enough to let that range show.

What the program doesn't try to be is everything. The Last Word's cocktail menu covers eras of American cocktail history. 312 Underground runs seasonal rotations that change the entire menu. Hunã runs a rum-forward program that does a few things extremely well and doesn't pretend to be more than that. Discipline in scope is a form of quality.

Where It Ranks

After five entries, Hunã sits at three.

That ranking requires a disclaimer: Hunã is the best tiki bar in Washtenaw County by a margin that isn't close, because it is the only one treating tiki as a serious subject rather than a themed venue. In its specific lane, nothing in the series competes. The question is whether The Pour is ranking "best at a specific thing" or "best cocktail bar." The answer has always been the latter, which means depth and range matter.

The Last Word runs the broadest and most technically rigorous cocktail program in the county. That's still the top. 312 Underground's seasonal volatility gives it the edge over a program organized by a single spirit category. Hunã at three is an honest read, not a slight.

What would change it: a room that works as well late on a Tuesday as it does on a Friday (the Thursday-Saturday schedule limits how often the bar can be tested), or a program that extends the rum focus into a broader conversation rather than keeping it contained to the tiki tradition.

As the series stands: Hunã at 3 is the ranking for the best of a different thing. On any given Thursday, it might be the most fun bar on the list.

Hunã Tiki Bar is at 200 S Main St (basement), Ann Arbor. Enter via Washington Street, west of Main. Open Thursday through Saturday, 7 p.m. to 2 a.m.

This is Entry 5 of The Pour: Best Cocktail Bar in Washtenaw County, an ongoing series.