Sacred Waters Kava Bar

Sacred Waters occupies a Detroit Avenue storefront in Lakewood and is the room that started Northeast Ohio's kava scene. David Kovatch opened it in 2022 as Ohio's first kava bar, with Mike Young and three further partners, after encountering kava while travelling and coming home to look for a space; it operated earlier under the Muddy Waters Kava Bar name, which is still how some older listings refer to it. Kovatch has been sober for more than a decade and describes the appeal in physical terms — kava melts the stress and anxiety away and leaves a clean euphoric feeling, as he put it to Cleveland Magazine. He went on to open the larger Sacred Vortex in Ohio City on the same alcohol-free premise, and Cleveland Scene readers voted Sacred Waters runner-up for Best Alcohol-Free Bar in 2026.

Kava is served traditionally, by shell and by origin, and priced accessibly: Solomon Isle at around $3.50, Vanuatu at $4, Tonga on a wider scale depending on preparation. It is also blended into longer drinks — cold-brew kava lattes, kava spritzers and a kava mule sit around $7 — and responsibly sourced botanical teas, coffee and non-alcoholic botanical cocktails round out the list. The hours are much of the point: open to midnight Sunday through Wednesday and 1am Thursday through Saturday, it is somewhere to go late without drinking, in a suburb where that otherwise means a diner. Kovatch keeps the room deliberately low-key and describes walking in as walking into his living room.

One thing to be clear about: Sacred Waters is an ethnobotanical bar, not simply a non-alcoholic one. Alongside kava it serves kratom, kanna and Egyptian blue lotus, and mixes kratom into drinks. These are psychoactive botanicals with their own effects, risks and interactions, and they are a different proposition from a zero-proof cocktail — anyone choosing an alcohol-free venue for recovery reasons should weigh that. The Lakewood room is now the only Sacred Waters; a second bar in North Olmsted is no longer listed on the company's own site.