Root of Happiness Kava Bar | Midtown

Root of Happiness is the reason Sacramento can reasonably claim to have had a kava scene before most American cities did. Travis Lowin and Tyler Blythe started the company in Rancho Cordova around 2013 — ahead of the first kava bars in Berkeley and New York, which arrived in 2015 — and have since grown it to four rooms around the region, each serving a noticeably different crowd. The Midtown location is the youngest of them, opened in March 2023 in a warehouse on the R Street Corridor, and it reads that way: a big, loud, high-ceilinged room with spray-painted street art across the walls, pink neon glowing over the bar, and live music on a regular schedule. It runs from 11am to 1am every day of the week, which makes it a genuine alternative to a bar rather than a daytime cafe that happens to sell kava.

The kava itself is treated as the point rather than as a novelty. The bar uses noble root only — the traditional cultivars, as opposed to the tudei kava that causes most of the unpleasant reports — sourced fresh-frozen from Hawaii, Fiji and the company's own American farms, then ground fresh and prepared by hand rather than reconstituted from instant powder. It is served traditionally in shells, and the surrounding menu is unusually developed for a kava bar: a specialty coffee programme built around the house Bula Blend, plus functional botanical drinks, ancient tonic herbs and iced botanical pours for anyone who wants the room without the root. Kava deserves plain description for this audience: it is psychoactive, made from the ground root of a South Pacific shrub steeped in water and drunk socially for roughly three thousand years. It contains no alcohol at all, but it is sedating and mildly intoxicating on its own terms — a distinction that matters if your recovery rules out intoxicants generally rather than alcohol specifically. The bar draws the same line itself, serving kava only to guests 18 and over with ID while keeping the coffee and botanical list open to everyone.