The Muddy Root Kava Cafe | Gulfport

The Gulfport branch of The Muddy Root runs 8am to midnight, seven days a week, on Gulfport Boulevard, and its location produces one of the more remarkable facts in this entire directory. Gulfport is a small Pinellas beach town of roughly 12,000 people. Within a few blocks of each other it supports this room, Low Tide Kava Bar, and Sober Bar on Beach Boulevard — three dedicated alcohol-free venues. That is very likely the highest concentration of alcohol-free rooms per head of population anywhere in the United States, and it is a useful corrective to the assumption that this category only works in large cities.

The group behind it operates five Florida sites and states its purpose directly: it exists to offer alcohol-free alternatives. The menu is genuinely all-day — kava, botanical teas, coffee, mocktails and fresh baked goods — which suits a small town where the same room has to work as a morning cafe and an evening social space because there is not enough population to support two separate businesses doing each.

Kava is the ground root of Piper methysticum, a shrub native to the South Pacific islands, prepared as a cold water infusion and drunk socially across Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Samoa for roughly three thousand years. It contains no alcohol. It tastes earthy and bitter, numbs the lips and tongue on the first mouthful, and is mildly sedative rather than intoxicating in the way alcohol is. Kava exhibits reverse tolerance, meaning regular drinkers typically need less rather than more, so a first visit is best paced across an hour or two.

Gulfport itself is worth the trip for anyone in the Tampa Bay area who is not drinking. It is walkable, it has a genuine arts scene, and the three venues sit close enough together to make an evening of moving between them — which is the ordinary shape of a night out, and something almost impossible to replicate elsewhere without alcohol.

The standing disclosure for this group applies here in full. **Kratom tea is prominently featured, with its own dedicated section on the menu alongside the kava.** Kratom is the leaf of a Southeast Asian tree, Mitragyna speciosa, whose principal alkaloids act on the opioid receptors; regular use produces tolerance and a real withdrawal syndrome, several US states prohibit it outright, and concentrated 7-hydroxymitragynine products derived from it are the subject of active federal scheduling action. Kava has no comparable dependence profile. The two sit side by side at similar prices, so order deliberately and ask what is in the cup — a question the staff at this group are used to answering.