Root Awakening Kava Bar

Root Awakening opened in Nashua in 2022 and was the first kava bar in New England. Gregory Gately started it after losing his brother to alcohol, and what he built is not a wellness café with late hours but a deliberate substitute for the room his brother could not safely be in. It sits in unit 603 of the 300 Main Street Marketplace, the Shaw's-anchored plaza on Main Street south of downtown, which is an unglamorous address for a business people drive to from across two states.

The kava is prepared the traditional way — root ground, strained through cheesecloth, dissolved in water, served with a piece of pineapple as a chaser — and sourced from Fiji, Vanuatu and elsewhere in the South Pacific. Around it are kava lattes, kava mocktails, kombucha on tap and snacks. Nothing served contains alcohol.

The hours and the programming are what make it function as a bar rather than a café, and they are the reason it matters. It runs to midnight Monday through Thursday and Sunday, and to 1am on Friday and Saturday. The week has a shape: movie night on Mondays at seven, ladies' night on Tuesdays, trivia with Tim on Wednesdays, a darts tournament on Thursdays, karaoke from eight on Fridays, with live music and one-off events besides. There is a games lounge with giant Jenga and Connect 4 and a free Pac-Man cabinet, and the room is dog-friendly. As Gately put it to CBS Boston, people who don't want to drink at traditional bars with alcohol now have a place — which is the entire proposition, and the reason a second Root Awakening has since opened in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The honest caveat, and CBS raised it directly. Kava contains no alcohol but it is psychoactive: a mild sedative that should not be combined with alcohol or with sedating medication, and it is worth planning your journey home around rather than driving off immediately. It is not regulated by the FDA as a supplement, and an FDA advisory more than twenty years ago flagged rare cases of liver injury — toxicologists quoted on the question generally attribute those to contaminants and unregulated foreign production rather than to noble kava properly sourced, but if you take regular medication it is a conversation to have with a clinician first. For anyone whose sobriety means avoiding mood-altering substances entirely, the kombucha is separate from the kava, and the staff are used to the question.