Root of Happiness Kava Bar | Rancho Cordova

This is the original. Travis Lowin and Tyler Blythe opened Root of Happiness in Rancho Cordova around 2013, at a point when kava bars barely existed in the continental United States — Berkeley and New York did not get theirs until 2015 — which makes this unassuming suburban room roughly fifteen miles east of downtown Sacramento one of the older continuously operating kava bars in the country, and the seed of what is now a four-location Northern California company. Comstock's Magazine, surveying the region's kava scene, noted that each of the four rooms ends up serving a distinctly different set of people; this one is the neighbourhood regulars' bar rather than the night-out destination its Midtown sibling has become. It opens at 11am and runs to 1am every day.

What has stayed constant across thirteen years is the sourcing discipline, which is the thing worth knowing about this company. The bar prepares noble root only — the traditional cultivars, rather than the cheaper tudei kava behind most bad first experiences — from fresh-frozen root brought in from Hawaii, Fiji and the company's own American farms, ground fresh and prepared by hand each day instead of mixed from instant powder. It is served in the traditional way, by the shell, with a specialty coffee programme built on the house Bula Blend and a list of functional botanical drinks and tonic-herb pours for anyone in the group who does not want kava. That last detail matters more than it sounds: the most common reason a non-drinker ends up somewhere they would rather not be is that their friends had nothing to order. Kava is worth describing plainly here, because this directory's readers include people in recovery — it is a psychoactive drink made from the ground root of a South Pacific shrub steeped in water, containing no alcohol whatsoever but genuinely sedating and mildly intoxicating in its own right. Root of Happiness draws that line itself, serving kava only to guests 18 and over with ID while leaving the coffee and botanical menu open to everyone.