Kava Cove Lounge

Kava Cove has been family owned and operated on West Fairbanks Avenue in Winter Park since 2016, which makes it one of the longest-running kava rooms in the Orlando metro and one of the few anywhere in Florida still run by the people who opened it. Orlando Weekly named it Best Kava and Kratom Bar in its Best of Orlando 2024 awards, calling it the paper's local favourite and noting the kratom drinks and kombucha on tap alongside the kava.

It opens at 11:30am every day and closes at midnight, stretching to 2am from Thursday through Saturday, with a daily happy hour from 4pm to 7pm at 25% off everything except canned drinks. That happy hour is worth noting for what it signals: a room pricing to fill an early evening, which is the hardest slot for an alcohol-free venue and the one that most closely substitutes for going to a bar after work.

The drinks span traditional kava alongside a range of house builds, with a cold case of canned options for anyone who wants something familiar in their hand. Kava is the ground root of Piper methysticum, a shrub native to the South Pacific, prepared as a cold water infusion and drunk socially across Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Samoa for roughly three thousand years. It contains no alcohol. It tastes earthy and bitter and numbs the lips and tongue on the first mouthful; the effect is mildly sedative and sociable rather than intoxicating in the sense alcohol is. Because kava exhibits reverse tolerance, regular drinkers typically need less rather than more, so a first visit is best paced across an hour or two rather than rushed.

The room programmes community events through the week, and Winter Park — an affluent, walkable town immediately north of Orlando with a dense restaurant and bar scene along Park Avenue — is a genuinely useful place for it to sit. Anyone who has stopped drinking in Winter Park has otherwise been choosing between a coffee shop that closes at 6pm and a wine bar.

A note for readers in recovery: kratom is served here alongside the kava. Orlando Weekly's 2024 write-up lists kratom drinks on the menu, and the paper's own award category names both. Across Florida the two are usually poured from the same bar, and the difference matters — kratom is a Southeast Asian leaf whose alkaloids act on the opioid receptors, carrying tolerance and withdrawal risk that kava does not, and it is banned outright in several US states. If your reason for seeking out a kava bar is that you are avoiding substances with dependence potential rather than alcohol alone, order by name and ask at the counter which drinks contain kratom.