Roots and Leaves: Tanoan Kava

Tanoan Kava sits at 2500 12th Street NW, in Albuquerque's Near North Valley just north of Old Town, and it is the New Mexico outpost of Roots & Leaves — a group of six kava bars spread across Colorado and New Mexico. Two of its Colorado siblings already appear in this directory: Peak Kava in Lakewood and Mile High Kava Bar in Westminster, both of which trade as full late-night alcohol-free bars. The group's other rooms are NoCo Kava, Stampede Kava and Casa de Kava.

The group's self-description is the clearest statement of purpose in the category — a sober kava bar, and a social space that doesn't revolve around alcohol — sold under the line join the sober shift. That framing is deliberate and it is the reason these rooms read differently from wellness cafes: the offer is not a healthier drink, it is a different place to spend an evening. This room opens at 10am and closes at midnight, seven days a week, which puts it in genuine evening territory rather than cafe hours.

The drinks are handcrafted kava alongside a range of traditional and ethnobotanical teas. Kava is the ground root of Piper methysticum, a shrub native to the South Pacific, prepared as a cold water infusion and drunk socially across Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Samoa for roughly three thousand years. It contains no alcohol. The taste is earthy and bitter, it numbs the lips and tongue on the first mouthful, and the effect is mildly sedative and sociable rather than intoxicating in the way alcohol is. Kava exhibits reverse tolerance, so regular drinkers generally need less rather than more, and a first visit is best paced across an hour or two. The group's wider tea programme uses active plant preparations rather than ordinary infusions, so it is worth asking what is in a given blend if you are sensitive to that.

For Albuquerque specifically, this is the third dedicated kava room in the city, joining Luna's Kava Root on Gold Avenue downtown and Gaia's Kava Root on Central Avenue in the university district. The three together give the city an alcohol-free spine that most metros of its size do not have. One practical note: this venue appears twice in Google's index, once under the full Roots & Leaves branding and once simply as Tanoan Kava, both at the same 12th Street address. They are the same room.