Root of Happiness Kava Bar | Davis

Root of Happiness opened its first kava bar in 2006, which makes it older than almost the entire American kava scene — it predates the Berkeley and New York rooms that are usually credited with starting the category, and the group describes itself, fairly, as the original California kava bar. It now runs six locations across Northern California. This directory already lists the Midtown Sacramento and Rancho Cordova rooms; the Davis and Roseville branches are new here.

The Davis room is at 211 F Street, in the compact downtown grid a few minutes' walk from the UC Davis campus, and it opens at 11am and closes at 1am every day of the week. That combination — a university town, a 1am licence-free close, and no alcohol on the premises — makes it one of the more useful rooms in the group. Davis nightlife runs heavily to student bars, and a venue on the same streets that stays open just as late without serving a drop is a genuine structural alternative rather than a token one.

What distinguishes Root of Happiness from most multi-site kava operators is that it began as a sourcing business rather than as a hospitality one. The founding objective, in the company's own account, was to identify exceptional kava from across the Pacific and to develop reliable ways of evaluating its quality — and the company still sells kava root and extracts as a retail operation alongside the bars. Tyler Blythe and Travis Lowin are named as the people behind it. The practical consequence for a customer is that the kava is treated as a varietal product with provenance, the way a serious coffee roaster treats beans, rather than as a generic ingredient.

Kava is the ground root of Piper methysticum, a shrub native to the South Pacific, infused in cold water and drunk socially across Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Samoa for around three thousand years. It contains no alcohol. It tastes earthy and bitter, numbs the lips and tongue on the first mouthful, and is mildly sedative — relaxing and sociable rather than intoxicating in the way alcohol is. It exhibits reverse tolerance, so regular drinkers usually need less rather than more, and a first visit is best taken slowly across an hour or two.

One point in the group's favour is worth recording, because this directory has to flag the opposite so often across the category: **Root of Happiness's published material covers kava, with no kratom listed on the menu.** For readers whose recovery excludes substances with dependence potential rather than alcohol alone, that makes this a straightforward room to order in.