Alibaba Lounge & Kava Bar

Alibaba is an alcohol-free lounge and cafe on Linebaugh Avenue in Carrollwood, open from noon to midnight and to 2am on Friday and Saturday, pairing a hookah programme with fruit-infused kava and an organic wellness drink list. It is worth being straightforward about the balance, because the name puts kava second and the business puts it second too: **this is a hookah lounge first, and the kava is genuine but sits alongside that rather than at the centre of it.**

For a certain reader that makes it exactly right. If what you want is a late, social, dressed-up room where nobody is drinking and the evening has some ceremony to it, Alibaba delivers that. The space is clean and carefully arranged, the music is good, Thursday is Ladies Night with half-price hookah, and the venue runs an events programme through the week. It serves no alcohol at any point, which in a category of hookah lounges is not a given.

For a different reader it is entirely wrong, and the reason has nothing to do with alcohol. **The room is not smoke-free, and hookah is the main draw.** Anyone avoiding tobacco and smoke — including a large share of people who have given up smoking alongside drinking, and anyone with a respiratory condition — should treat that as disqualifying rather than as a detail. This directory would rather say that plainly than have someone discover it after driving across the city.

On the kava itself: it is the ground root of Piper methysticum, a shrub native to the South Pacific islands, prepared as a cold water infusion and drunk socially across Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Samoa for roughly three thousand years. It contains no alcohol. It tastes earthy and bitter, numbs the lips and tongue on the first mouthful, and is mildly sedative rather than intoxicating in the way alcohol is. Alibaba serves it fruit-infused, which is a reasonable way to introduce it to people who have not had it before — the bitterness is the main barrier for most first-timers.

Carrollwood is a residential quadrant of north Tampa, and Alibaba sits close to Ritual Kava Lounge on Dale Mabry, giving the neighbourhood two very different alcohol-free rooms within a few minutes of each other. Ritual is the one built around games and community programming; Alibaba is the one built around a night out with some occasion to it. Which of the two suits you depends almost entirely on how you feel about smoke.