Karuna Kava & Tea (Meridian)

Meridian is the second Karuna Kava & Tea, opened in May 2026 on East Overland Road, and it is the more interesting of the two locations strategically even though Garden City is the original. Ben and Kayleigh McQueen opened that first room in 2022 as Idaho's first kava bar, built out of Ben's own path to sobriety and framed as a third space rather than a business opportunity. Four years later they expanded into Meridian — a suburb that has been among the fastest-growing cities in the United States and which, like most American suburbs, offers people who do not drink almost nowhere to go in the evening that is not a chain restaurant. A second alcohol-free room opening there is a better signal about demand for this category than any market-size report.

The offering carries over from Garden City intact. Kava is brewed fresh daily and served in named strengths. The organic tea list is genuinely extensive, running herbal, white, black, green and oolong, and it is joined by locally roasted coffee, chicory coffee for anyone off caffeine, a mushroom blend, kombucha on tap that the company is careful to specify is non-alcoholic at under 0.5% ABV, and locally crafted sodas and switchels from Erth Beverage Co. The breadth is the point rather than a detail: a room meant for groups only works if the person who does not want kava still has six things worth ordering. Hours run to 11pm every night, which is late enough to be an actual evening out rather than an errand. On kava itself, the plain version for readers in recovery: it is the ground root of a South Pacific shrub steeped in water, drunk socially across the Pacific for around three thousand years, entirely free of alcohol but genuinely sedating and mildly intoxicating on its own terms — a real distinction if you are avoiding intoxicants rather than avoiding alcohol.