Luna's Kava Root

Luna's Kava Root occupies a suite on Gold Avenue in the middle of downtown Albuquerque, and the single most important thing about it is the closing time: 2am, every night of the week, with nothing alcoholic served at any point. Downtown bar districts are the hardest environment in any city for somebody who has stopped drinking, because the alternative to the bar is usually going home, and a room that keeps genuine late-night hours without a liquor licence is a rare and specific kind of useful. The space has been described as a sober bar with a buzz, and that framing is fair — cosy but modern, plenty of seating, music kept at a level people can talk over, and an atmosphere pitched deliberately away from the hectic energy of the venues around it. Live music and events run through the week.

The menu is built like a bar list rather than a cafe board. Kava comes by the shell or by the growler to take away. The exotic tea programme is the unusually deep part, split across tiki-style builds, teas on tap, tea shots and full mocktails, so a group can order four genuinely different things without anyone defaulting to a soda. Hot and iced coffee runs alongside, and a snack counter covers grab-and-go food and desserts for a long sitting. Reviewers return repeatedly to the same point — that the staff will walk a newcomer through what kava is, how it tastes and how much to start with — which is the behaviour that distinguishes a kava bar people come back to from one they try once. Kava is a psychoactive root drink from the South Pacific, prepared by steeping the ground root in water. It has no alcohol in it, but it is a genuine relaxant with an intoxicating quality of its own, which is worth being clear about if what you are avoiding is intoxication rather than alcohol specifically.