Kamp Kava

Kamp Kava occupies Suite 501 in the All Florida Commerce Center on State Road 7, and it commits to its camping conceit more thoroughly than any themed room has a right to. There is an actual camper parked inside. There is a loft strung with hammocks. There is a corner fitted out as a treehouse and stocked with retro video games. It would be easy to read all of that as decoration, but it does a specific job: it gives people something to do with their hands and their evening, which is the hardest problem a room without alcohol has to solve.

The programming follows the same logic. Themed nights run around anime and Dungeons & Dragons rather than around drink promotions, which produces the thing that separates a genuine third place from a shop with chairs — people arriving because of who else will be there. The room trades from noon to midnight, seven days a week, and serves no alcohol at any point.

The drinks list is broad for the category: kava, coffee, kombucha, herbal teas, specialty beverages, soft drinks and snacks. Kava is the ground root of Piper methysticum, a South Pacific shrub, infused in cold water and drunk socially across Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Samoa for around three thousand years. It contains no alcohol whatsoever. The taste is earthy and bitter and it numbs the lips and tongue on the first sip; the effect is mildly sedative and sociable rather than intoxicating in alcohol's sense. Because kava exhibits reverse tolerance, regular drinkers typically need less rather than more, so a first visit is best taken slowly.

Davie is a Broward County town of about 110,000 people with no bar district, no walkable centre and an evening economy that runs to chain restaurants and sports bars. Against that, the fact that it now supports four dedicated alcohol-free rooms — Kamp Kava alongside Kavana, 3rd Space and Davie Kava — is genuinely notable, and Kamp Kava is the one most clearly built for staying several hours rather than stopping in.

One disclosure has to be made plainly. **Kratom is served here alongside the kava.** The two plants are routinely sold from the same bar across Florida and are frequently spoken about in the same breath, and they are not the same class of drink. Kratom is the leaf of a Southeast Asian tree whose alkaloids act on the opioid receptors; it produces tolerance and a real withdrawal syndrome in regular users, several states prohibit it, and concentrated 7-OH kratom products are under active federal scheduling. Kava does not work that way, and a large share of the people who seek out a kava bar are doing so precisely because of that difference. Ask which one is in your cup.