Makana Kava Bar & Hawaiian Kitchen

Makana Kava Bar & Hawaiian Kitchen opened in North Miami in 2024, and the second half of its name is what makes it worth a specific trip. Most kava bars are drinks-only rooms where the food, if it exists, is a basket of chips and a couple of empanadas — which quietly limits how long a group can stay and how easily a kava bar substitutes for a night at a restaurant bar. Makana runs an actual Hawaiian kitchen: chicken katsu tenders, loco moco fries, huli huli sliders, poke bowls and empanadas, served alongside the drinks rather than as an afterthought to them. Combined with hours that run from noon to 2am seven nights a week, that turns the room into somewhere you can arrive hungry at nine and still be there at one, which is precisely the pattern that a licensed bar normally owns.

The drinks are premium kava and botanical mocktails, and the house framing is refreshingly plain — premium kava, botanical mocktails, daily good vibes, and no alcohol. Miami already has one of the densest kava scenes in the United States, and the competition for a new room here is genuinely stiff, so pairing the kava with a kitchen is a sensible way to be distinct rather than merely additional. For anyone in recovery reading this, the honest description of the anchor drink: kava is made from the ground root of a South Pacific shrub, steeped in water and strained, and has been drunk socially across the Pacific for roughly three thousand years. It contains no alcohol at all, and it is not a stimulant. It is, however, a genuine relaxant with an intoxicating quality of its own, and it is served to adults. If what you are avoiding is alcohol specifically, kava is a straightforward substitute; if what you are avoiding is intoxication in general, it is worth knowing what you are ordering before you order it.