SquareRüt Kava Bar – Oak Hill

SquareRüt opened its Oak Hill location as the second Austin outpost of the kava bar Scott Pingel and Tracy Moreno started in 2011 after discovering kava in 2008 — the first kava bar in Texas, and one of the earliest anywhere in the American South. The company's stated mission is to make kava as accessible and beloved as coffee, and the Oak Hill room is the clearest expression of that: it opens at 7am and closes at 10pm, which is a coffee shop's day rather than a bar's.

That span is the reason to know about it. Most alcohol-free venues open in the late afternoon and compete for the evening, which means they are only useful for the part of the day people were already going out. A room that serves from seven in the morning works as a place to have breakfast, take a meeting, spend an afternoon working, and then stay into the evening — without the composition of the room changing around you, and without a bar appearing in it at six o'clock.

Kava is served the traditional way, by strain and by size: Low Tide, High Tide and Tsunami, across Aolani from Vanuatu (spicy, focused, cerebral), Waka from Fiji (mild, peppery, social, euphoric), Lomi from Vanuatu (gentle, sedative, a muscle relaxant and sleep aid) and Moi, a Hawaiian green kava. Being able to choose a strain by intended effect rather than by flavour is unusual outside dedicated kava bars, and it is the main thing that separates one from a cafe that happens to stock kava.

The house drinks soften the taste for newcomers: Kaptain's Kava is sparkling prickly pear kava with black ginger, Name was Mud puts sparkling prickly pear against traditional kava, and there are the Kava Chai, the seasonal OG Grog and the Kavarita. A full kitchen runs pizza, garlic knots, salads and Easy Tiger pastries, with children ten and under eating free on Thursdays with any pizza — which tells you what kind of room this is.

The standard caution applies. Kava is not alcohol, but it is psychoactive: a mild sedative that should not be combined with alcohol or sedating medication, can slow reflexes enough to affect driving, and has been associated with liver concerns in heavy or prolonged use.