Around the Kava Bowl

Around the Kava Bowl has been serving kava in Captain Cook since 2019, from a room at the back of the Hoʻo Hui wellness centre on Mamalahoa Highway — the heritage building that used to be the Captain Cook courthouse, across the road from NAPA auto parts. Captain Cook sits about twelve miles and a good deal of elevation above Kailua-Kona, and the bar leans into that: its own pitch is that when it is too hot down in Kona you come up the hill to cool off with kava and friends. On an island where most visitor-facing drinking happens at sea level in a resort, that is a genuinely different evening.

The kava is fresh Hawaiian and other Pacific root, prepared from powder, and nothing served contains alcohol. The bar states its purpose directly — to create and nurture ʻohana through a strong sense of community, culture and oneness around the kava bowl — and its own writing about kava is unusually careful for a business selling it, describing the plant as a vital part of ancient and modern Polynesian culture that travelled with Pacific voyagers, and being plain that the effects are mildly sedative, anaesthetic and euphoric and that the taste runs somewhere between cucumber water, potato peels, black pepper and earth. That is a more honest tasting note than most kava bars print.

Two practical notes. Opening hours are not reliably published anywhere we can verify — the website, the listings and the review sites all disagree or stay silent — so this is a phone-ahead venue rather than a turn-up one, particularly if you are driving up from Kona for it. And it is a small room inside a wellness centre rather than a standalone bar, which suits a quiet couple of hours better than a large group.

The usual caution applies and the bar states most of it itself. Kava contains no alcohol but is psychoactive: a mild sedative that should not be combined with alcohol or with sedating medication, and worth planning the drive back down the hill around rather than setting off immediately after.