Oasis Botanical Lounge

Oasis sits in the middle of Carr Mill Mall, the converted textile mill on North Greensboro Street that is the commercial centre of downtown Carrboro, and it is the second alcohol-free room in a town whose social life otherwise runs on bars. Where Krave a few blocks away keeps bar hours, Oasis keeps café hours — ten in the morning until seven, from noon on Sunday — and that is the right way to think about it: a place to sit with a drink in the afternoon, work, or meet someone, with no alcohol on the premises.

The founders are Alicia Roskind Dearing and James Dearing, carrying on the work of her father Robert Roskind, an author whose books and free music events in Jamaica, Guatemala and the Havasupai reservation are the source of the One Love message the room is built around. The lounge began as a coffee shop — the coffee is still Pure Intentions, an organic direct-trade Peruvian roast from Charlotte, and the hot teas are Rishi organics from Earl Grey to Masala Chai and Jasmine Green — and has grown into what it calls a haven for botanical wellness.

Kava is the drink to know about. Oasis serves it micronized, a finely ground powder that is prepared in one of the house juices or milks rather than steeped and strained, and it also sells the powder to take home. Beside it are functional mushroom drinks built on Sporeganix extract powders from Winston-Salem — reishi, lion's mane, chaga and five others, up to three in one drink in juice or chocolate almond milk — and cold teas and fermented drinks. Kava contains no alcohol but is mildly psychoactive; anyone pregnant, on medication or managing liver health should ask a doctor first.

Two things need saying plainly. The lounge also prepares kratom, a plant in the coffee family with effects of its own, in four strains, and it sells delta-THC and CBD products under its own wellness line. All of it is labelled, none of it is alcohol, and a reader avoiding every intoxicant should order the coffee, the tea or a mushroom drink and say so. Weekly stretching and drumming sessions and a monthly Kirtan music evening are the events that give the room its character, and the shop ships its products for anyone not in the neighbourhood.