WLVS Den Kava Lounge

WLVS Den Kava Lounge is a fully alcohol-free kava bar at 5447 South Rainbow Boulevard, Suite E7, in Spring Valley — southwest of the Strip in a Rainbow Boulevard strip mall, not downtown, despite several listings filing it in the Arts District. It bills itself as Nevada's only licensed kava bar, and is the current branding of the lounge that launched at this same address in 2019 as 9th Island Kava Lounge. Kava is worth describing plainly, because the audience for a bar like this includes people in recovery: it is a psychoactive botanical from the Pacific Islands, prepared as a water infusion of the root of the kava plant and drunk socially in place of alcohol. It is not alcohol and contains none, but it is mildly sedative and it is intoxicating in its own right, which is a distinction that matters if you are avoiding intoxicants of every kind rather than avoiding alcohol specifically. It is served here in the traditional way — shells, quads, thirty-seven-ounce Big Bula jugs, half-gallons, gallons and Tanoa bowls — brewed fresh daily in rotating flavours including horchata, blueberry and peach.

Alongside the kava proper is a specialty list of teas and functional drinks, some of them micro-dosed with kava and some with none at all: WLF MNT Tea (white tea, fresh peppermint, agave), the stronger Trainwrckr Tea, Cup of Joe (cacao, ashwagandha, eight mushrooms, red tea, micronised kava, agave), Cocao, and Night Cap (magnesium, lemonade, ashwagandha, micronised kava, vitamin C). The house GOLD'n BULA is marketed as the strongest kava shot available without resorting to harmful extract. A daily happy hour from 3pm to 6pm takes half off all shells and teas, Trainwrckr excepted. The lounge doubles as the unofficial Las Vegas Star Trek headquarters, with custom themed drinks and monthly watch parties, and fills the rest of its calendar with live music, board games and karaoke. Nothing alcoholic is served at any hour.