The Pour: Hunã Tiki Bar
Entry 5. The best rum program in Washtenaw County runs in a basement. The series has to decide what that's worth.
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, built so the fruit and sweetness carry the front of the drink and the overproof rum takes over at the finish. That's the classic Zombie architecture, not a house tweak.
The Strong Island is the fallback if the Zombie's two-drink cap feels like a dare rather than an invitation: gin, rum, vodka, lemon, cinnamon, curaçao, grapefruit soda, and bitters. Cinnamon is the unusual choice, most tropical menus lean on straight sweetness, and three spirits plus bitters is enough to make two of these a full evening on their own.
The Iguana breaks from the rum focus entirely: gin, Midori, dry vermouth, green Chartreuse, and Salers aperitif, a build that reads bitter and herbaceous by ingredient alone, territory most tiki menus don't go near. That a rum-forward program can also run something like the Iguana without it feeling like a mistake is a sign the menu has range beyond its theme.
Cocktails run $14 to $19. Large-format shareable drinks exist for groups and cost less per serving than four individual orders. The non-alcoholic list is taken seriously, which matters more than cocktail bars usually acknowledge.
The Room
The entrance is off Washington Street, west of South Main, unmarked. A staircase leads down.
The room the Ann Arbor Observer described, a 4,000-square-foot basement with a thatched-roof bar, bamboo trim, booths, banquettes, and high-top seating, seats around 78. The aesthetic is fully committed: not a bar with a tiki theme, but a tiki bar. The bamboo and thatch are built out rather than pasted on, and the greenery sits in corners that were designed to hold it.
What Hunã gets right that other concept bars get wrong is that it does not wink. The room plays it straight, with no ironic distance between the aesthetic and the experience. The bar has decided: you are in this, 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. A three-night week concentrates demand: weekends will be the harder table to get, Thursday the more available one.
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 makes 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-through-Saturday schedule means that comparison isn't available), 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.