Twisted Roots Kava Brewery

Twisted Roots is the busiest alcohol-free room on Hollywood Boulevard by a wide margin, and it trades on a bar's schedule rather than a cafe's: 8am to 2am from Sunday through Wednesday, and 8am to 3am from Thursday through Saturday, with a happy hour running 4pm to 8pm. The interior is done out as a jungle, the shelves carry board games, the WiFi is free, and both dogs and children are welcome — a combination that makes it work as a family afternoon and a late night out from the same fit-out.

The drinks programme is organised by origin, which is unusual in this category and tells you something about how the room thinks. Awa comes from the South Pacific islands — awa is the Hawaiian name for kava, and using it signals a bar that knows the drink's provenance. Matcha comes from Japan. Coffee comes from South America. Kava itself is the ground root of Piper methysticum, 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 sense alcohol is. Because it exhibits reverse tolerance, regular drinkers typically need less rather than more, so a first visit is best paced across an hour or two.

Hollywood Boulevard runs from downtown to the beach through one of the denser drinking strips in Broward County, and Twisted Roots sits on it alongside Elixir's original Harrison Street room and Club Kava a few blocks south. Between them, this stretch of Hollywood has quietly become the strongest alcohol-free cluster in the county — better served than Fort Lauderdale proper.

The fourth pillar of the menu requires its own paragraph, because the naming actively obscures what it is. **Maeng Da Kra-tea is kratom.** "Kra-tea" is a contraction of kratom, and Maeng Da is one of its best-known strain names; the tea framing is standard across Florida and genuinely easy to misread as a herbal infusion. Kratom is the leaf of a Southeast Asian tree, Mitragyna speciosa, and its principal alkaloids act on the opioid receptors. Regular use produces tolerance and a real withdrawal syndrome, several US states ban it outright, and concentrated 7-hydroxymitragynine products derived from it are under active federal scheduling. Kava carries no comparable dependence profile, and a great many people drink kava specifically because it does not.

None of that makes Twisted Roots a bad room — it is a genuinely good one, and it is entirely alcohol-free. It makes it a room where you should read the menu headers and ask what is in the cup before you order.