Root of Happiness Kava Bar | Roseville

Root of Happiness's Roseville room occupies 232 Vernon Street, on the pedestrianised stretch at the centre of Roseville's downtown regeneration, and it opens at 11am and closes at 1am seven days a week. Its significance is geographic as much as anything: Placer County, covering Roseville, Rocklin, Lincoln and Granite Bay, is one of the fastest-growing parts of the Sacramento metro and has essentially no other dedicated alcohol-free social venue. Vernon Street itself is lined with bars and restaurants, so this is a direct alternative on the same walk rather than an out-of-town errand.

The group behind it is the oldest operator in California kava. Root of Happiness opened its first bar in 2006 — before the wave of kava rooms that spread across Florida and Colorado in the 2010s — and describes itself as the original California kava bar, now running six locations across Northern California. Two of the others, in Midtown Sacramento and Rancho Cordova, are already listed in this directory; the Davis branch is added alongside this one.

The company's origin is unusual for a bar group in that it started from the product rather than the room. Its founding objective, in its own account, was to identify exceptional kava from across the Pacific and to develop reliable ways to evaluate its quality, and it continues to operate as a kava retailer alongside its bars, with Tyler Blythe and Travis Lowin named as the people behind it. That matters at the counter: kava here is handled as a varietal product with origin and grading, not as an undifferentiated commodity.

For anyone new to it, kava is the ground root of Piper methysticum, a shrub native to the South Pacific islands. It is infused in cold water and drunk socially — across Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Samoa the practice runs back roughly three thousand years. It contains no alcohol at any point. The taste is earthy and bitter and it numbs the lips and tongue on the first mouthful; the effect is mildly sedative and sociable rather than intoxicating in the sense alcohol is. Kava shows reverse tolerance, meaning regular drinkers typically need less rather than more to feel it, so a first visit rewards a slow pace across an hour or two rather than a single fast serving.

As with the Davis room, one thing is worth noting positively. **Root of Happiness's published menu covers kava, with no kratom listed on it** — unusual in a category where the two are normally poured side by side, and materially easier to navigate for anyone avoiding substances with dependence potential rather than alcohol alone.