The Church of Root Kava Bar

The Church of Root occupies a small storefront on NE 15th Avenue in the Sabin neighbourhood of inner Northeast Portland, and it keeps deliberately compact hours — 4pm to 10pm, seven days a week. That evening-only schedule tells you what it is for. This is not a cafe that sells kava as a sideline to laptops and lunch; it opens at the hour when people finish work and want somewhere to go, and it closes before the small hours. The whole proposition is stated plainly by the bar itself: authentic kava, a relaxing environment, and engaging conversation, in a welcoming space designed for socialising and genuine connection. Nothing alcoholic is served.

The kava is prepared traditionally, from high-quality roots following time-honoured methods, which in practice means the root is ground and strained by hand rather than reconstituted from an instant powder — the difference between the two is roughly the difference between brewed coffee and a sachet, and it is the single biggest variable in whether somebody's first kava experience is a good one. Around it sits a varied menu of other non-alcoholic drinks, so a group is not obliged to order kava to have a reason to sit down. Portland has quietly built one of the deeper kava scenes on the West Coast — Bula Kava House on SE Division, Kava Saia on East Burnside and Nalu in North Portland were already here — and the Church of Root adds a specifically neighbourhood-scaled room to that list rather than another destination. Kava deserves a plain description for readers in recovery: it is made from the ground root of a South Pacific shrub steeped in water, contains no alcohol whatsoever, and has been drunk socially across the Pacific for roughly three thousand years. It is, however, genuinely relaxing and mildly intoxicating in its own right, which matters if what you are avoiding is intoxication generally rather than alcohol specifically.