Kanaka Kava

Kanaka Kava has been open since 2001, which makes it older than almost every venue in this directory and older than the American kava-bar scene it is usually filed alongside. It sits in the Coconut Grove Marketplace on Aliʻi Drive in Kailua-Kona, a small open-air room set back from the town's commercial waterfront strip, with limited outdoor seating and a deliberately unpolished feel. It was founded by ʻAnakala Zach and is run now by his ʻohana.

The distinction that matters here is that this is not a bar that buys kava. It is a Native Hawaiian family farm that also runs a bar. The ʻawa is grown and harvested on their own land on Hawaiʻi Island and served fresh in coconut-shell cups, and the same farm-to-table logic runs through the food: traditional Hawaiian plates of kalua pork, squid lūʻau, poke, baked ʻuala and poi, poi bowls topped with fresh fruit and granola, fresh coconut water, kombucha and house POG. Lakea Trask, a Hawaiian farmer and land activist, is among those cultivating the ʻawa and other native crops behind it. In a state where kava's revival is bound up with Native food sovereignty — Hawaiʻi formally recognised ʻawa as a safe traditional food in 2025 — that provenance is the point rather than a marketing line.

As somewhere to spend an evening without alcohol, it works because it is not organised around abstinence. It opens at three and runs to ten or eleven, there is open-mic and live music through the week, and it draws a settled local crowd rather than a resort one. Kailua-Kona is otherwise a town of hotel bars and mai tais; this is the room that is not that, and it has been the room that is not that for twenty-five years.

What to know before a first bowl, because ʻawa is not what most visitors expect. It is drunk in one go rather than sipped, it tastes earthy and peppery, and it numbs the mouth briefly — all normal. The effect builds slowly, so newcomers routinely assume nothing is happening and order again too fast. And the standard caution applies: kava contains no alcohol but is psychoactive, a mild sedative that should not be combined with alcohol or sedating medication, and it is worth not driving straight afterwards. If you are avoiding intoxicants entirely, the food, the coconut water and the POG are all separate from the ʻawa.