Casa Cacao

Casa Cacao opened on East Hudson Street in Old North Columbus in 2024, the work of owner Ayala Wolak, and is the first cafe in the city to build a menu around both kava and cacao. The building it occupies has had several lives — a theatre, a barbershop and a church — and had sat empty for years before the fit-out. Wolak told The Lantern that the opening "has been like a homecoming for me; not only back to Columbus, but into myself," and that she hoped guests would "feel like we care about them and leave with a sense of community." The cafe serves no alcohol at any hour, which makes it one of very few genuinely alcohol-free social rooms in Columbus rather than a bar with a zero-proof section bolted on.

The drinks divide into three families. Coffee runs to a full espresso list including Daisy's Limelight, a double shot cut with a twist of lime. Cacao is prepared as a paste rather than cocoa powder — more bitter, more concentrated, and carrying theobromine as its active compound — and appears in drinks such as the Bear's Elixir, built with orange oil, clove, cinnamon and coconut sugar. Kava is the third, and the one that most distinguishes the room: a root traditionally prepared in the Pacific Islands and served here as a spiced 12-ounce tea or as a concentrated shot. It is worth being plain that kava is psychoactive and mildly sedating, which is a different proposition from a mocktail; Wolak has put the dose at roughly a tablespoon and a half of powder per drink, with the tea noticeably weaker than the shot. Kombucha, hot chocolate, alcohol-free wine and a frothed oat-milk drink called The Fluffy round out the list, and the cafe runs $5 kava on Thursday and Saturday evenings from 6 to 8pm. Well-behaved leashed dogs are welcome. A few practical notes. Casa Cacao is a cafe rather than a bar, and it keeps cafe hours — from 8am daily, closing at 8pm most nights and 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays — so it works as a morning or afternoon room as readily as an evening one, which is unusual among alcohol-free venues. It is also, at the time of writing, effectively the only dedicated alcohol-free social space of its kind in Columbus, a city that has otherwise built its non-alcoholic offering inside licensed bars and restaurants. Anyone who has not had kava before should approach the shots with some care and ask staff about strength; the drink is legal and widely sold in the United States, but it is a sedating botanical and it interacts poorly with alcohol and with some medications, which is a conversation worth having rather than assuming.