Kava Kulture LA

Kava Kulture LA sits on Glendale Boulevard in Atwater Village and claims to be the first kava bar in Los Angeles, a city that took a surprisingly long time to get one given how much of its social life already runs on wellness and abstinence. It is counter service, and the defining detail in every account of the place is the furniture: worn couches that people sink into for hours-long conversations. That is a deliberate design choice rather than neglect. The menu is narrow on purpose — traditional kava, the house K-Tea, coffee drinks and herbal teas, and no food whatsoever — which stops it drifting into being a cafe where people work on laptops and keeps it functioning as a room where the point is talking to whoever is next to you. Happy hour runs from 3pm to 6:30pm, and it stays open to midnight on Friday and Saturday nights.

What the room actually trades in is programming. It operates as a neighbourhood social hub, with open-mic sessions covering comedy, music and poetry, chess tournaments, and tabletop card-gaming meetups filling the calendar. For a person who has stopped drinking, that combination — a fixed reason to be somewhere, on a schedule, in a room where nobody is drinking — solves the problem that alcohol-free bars often do not, which is that turning up alone to sit quietly is harder than it sounds. No alcohol is served at any hour. The house policy on age is worth noting because it reflects an honest understanding of the product: everyone is welcome in the space and the coffee and tea menu is open to all ages, but kava is served only to guests 18 and over. That is the right line to draw. Kava is made from the ground root of a South Pacific shrub steeped in water, contains no alcohol at all, and has been drunk socially across the Pacific for around three thousand years — but it is psychoactive and genuinely sedating, which is a distinction worth understanding before your first shell rather than after it.