Nalu Kava Tea Lounge

Nalu occupies the second floor of the building at 722 N Sumner Street that Cherry Sprout Produce has anchored since 2007, tucked in beside the Red Fox on a corner that has been a Humboldt neighbourhood institution for years. Getting in requires knowing it is there: the entrance is off the alley behind the bar, up a flight of stairs, with no street frontage to speak of. Owner Holland Mulder has been candid that this is deliberate — as she told Willamette Week when the lounge opened, only the daring and persistent find the place.

She built it for a specific reason. Mulder reached a point where she no longer wanted her evenings to happen in bars, and what she wanted instead — somewhere open late, social, with something interesting in the cup and no alcohol anywhere — did not exist in her part of North Portland. So the menu is kava prepared by hand from real root, drinking chocolate made properly and thickly, mushroom tonics built on chaga and lion's mane, superfood lattes, kombucha and fire cider. Nothing on it is alcoholic.

The room does a lot of the work. Indoors it is small and warm, filled with plants, stacks of books and oracle decks, and it suits both a solo evening with something to read and a table of three or four talking quietly. Upstairs again is the part regulars send people for: a rooftop patio with a greenhouse, which in a city that spends half the year under cloud is a genuinely different proposition from a covered smoking shelter. Hours are short and specific — five to eleven, closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays — so it rewards checking Instagram before setting out.

The honest caveat is the same one that applies to every kava room. Kava contains no alcohol, but it is psychoactive: mildly sedating, slow to come on, and not something to mix with alcohol or with sedating prescriptions. Some of the mushroom and adaptogen drinks here are functional rather than intoxicating, and the drinking chocolate is simply drinking chocolate, so there is plenty on the menu for someone avoiding mood-altering substances entirely — but it is worth asking which is which rather than assuming.