Kava Garden South of Fifth

Kava Garden sits in unit CU-4 at 100 Collins Avenue, the southern tip of Miami Beach, in the South of Fifth neighbourhood — a few blocks and an entire register away from the Ocean Drive strip. The distinction matters for anyone using this directory: South of Fifth is residential, quieter and largely free of the sidewalk hawking that makes the rest of South Beach hard work for someone not drinking. The venue calls itself a plant-based bar, which is an accurate description of the whole proposition rather than a wellness flourish. There is no alcohol on the premises at any point.

The hours are what qualify it as a genuine alternative rather than a daytime cafe. It opens at 10am Monday through Saturday and 11am on Sunday, and closes at midnight at the start of the week, pushing to 1am from Friday through Sunday. That is a bar's schedule in a neighbourhood where the alternative is a bar. The room is arranged as a garden rather than around a service counter, with planting through the seating, and it functions as somewhere to sit for the hour or two that kava actually asks of you rather than somewhere to collect a drink and leave.

The drinks divide into three: traditional kava preparations, coffee, and teas, with the full list published as a PDF menu rather than on the page itself. Kava Garden operates two further Miami Beach sites, including one at 1201 20th Street and a Sunset Harbor location, so the group is a small local chain rather than a single room.

One thing has to be stated plainly, because this directory is read by people in recovery and because Florida kava bars almost universally pour both. **Kava Garden serves kratom as well as kava**, and gives it a dedicated explanatory section on its own site describing the leaf and its traditional uses. The two are not equivalent and should not be treated as interchangeable. Kava is the ground root of a South Pacific shrub, infused in water, alcohol-free, mildly sedative, drunk socially for around three thousand years and not associated with physical dependence. Kratom is a Southeast Asian leaf whose alkaloids bind to opioid receptors; it carries a real dependence and withdrawal risk, it is banned outright in several US states, and concentrated 7-hydroxymitragynine products derived from it are the subject of active federal scheduling. A large share of the people who seek out a kava bar are doing so precisely because it is not that. Read the menu headers, and ask.