The Botanical Drinks Replacing the After-Work Cocktail in New York

At 6:15 on a Wednesday, there’s a line outside a bar on Avenue B that doesn’t serve alcohol. Inside, people are drinking something the color of pond water out of coconut shells, touching cups, saying “bula,” and grimacing. Nobody’s leaving. Two doors down, the wine bar has three stools open.

The after-work drink hasn’t gone anywhere. The alcohol has. Gallup’s 2025 survey found that 54% of American adults drink at all, the lowest number it’s ever recorded, and NIQ’s data shows non-alcoholic beer, wine, and spirits crossing $1 billion in retail sales last year, up 22%. What those numbers don’t capture is the stranger, more interesting end of the trend: rooms built around plants most New Yorkers couldn’t name three years ago.

Why the cocktail is losing the 6 p.m. slot

The easy explanation is health, and it’s partly right. But people didn’t stop wanting the thing a cocktail bar provides, which is a reason to sit somewhere with other adults for an hour after work. They wanted it without the second drink turning into the fourth, and without Thursday morning.

Kava bars and their botanical cousins solved that by keeping the ritual and swapping the liquid. There’s still a bartender, still a menu with house specials, still a room that fills up after six. The difference is that most people leave around nine, clear-headed, and come back the next night. Owners will tell you that regulars are the whole business model. A cocktail bar’s best customer visits twice a month. A kava bar’s visits four times a week.

What a kava bar actually is

Kava is a root from the South Pacific, ground and steeped in cold water, and it’s been the center of ceremonial life in Fiji, Vanuatu, and Tonga for a very long time. The drink is served in a shell or a bowl, not a glass. The taste is earthy going on muddy, and the polite way to describe a first bowl is “an acquired taste.” The impolite way is what everyone actually says.

New York has a small but stubborn scene. Hekate Café & Elixir Lounge in the East Village leans occult, with tarot on Sundays and a mocktail list. Kavasutra, a few blocks away, is closer to the Florida original: dim, loud, communal. Brooklyn Kava in Bushwick is the neighborhood-hangout version. A directory audit this summer counted about nine active kava venues statewide, most of them in Manhattan and Brooklyn, which is small next to Florida’s hundreds but roughly double what the city had before the pandemic.

The adaptogenic soda shelf

If a kava bar is the deep end, the bodega cooler is the shallow one. Cans of ashwagandha soda, reishi tonics, and lion’s mane sparkling waters now sit beside the seltzer at Whole Foods and most Manhattan delis. NIQ notes that households earning over $100,000 are driving more than 80% of growth in non-alcoholic beverages, which explains the $5 price tags and the tasteful matte labels.

These are the entry point. They taste like soda, they don’t require a bartender, and they let someone try the category on a lunch break. The people who like them are the ones who end up in line on Avenue B a month later.

Kratom seltzers and shots, and why they’re different

Most kava bars in the city also serve kratom, and most first-timers assume it’s the same thing. It isn’t. Kratom is a leaf, not a root, from a Southeast Asian tree in the coffee family, and it ended up on kava menus mostly because the Florida bars that invented the format stocked both. Regulars call the kratom drink “tea,” which is what it traditionally was in Thailand and Indonesia, where the fresh leaf was brewed or simply chewed.

In New York it comes two ways. Kava bars pour it as a brewed tea, and the cooler holds canned kratom seltzers and two-ounce shots, the same formats now showing up in convenient stores across the boroughs. The seltzers taste like flavored sparkling water. The shots taste like nothing you’d order twice.

The habit does travel home. Regulars who’d rather make it at home tend to buy kratom from vendors that post batch lab results, since the shot behind the bar rarely comes with one. Leaf content varies enough between harvests that a published report is the only way to know what’s in the cup, and the better vendors have started printing a QR code on the bag that opens the report for that batch.

How to read the room at a botanical bar

A few things nobody explains at the door. Don’t order a “cocktail”; the menu will say bowl, shell, or tea. Expect the first kava to be served with a piece of pineapple, which is there for a reason. Ask what’s in the house tea before you order it, because some rooms brew kava and kratom separately and some don’t. Tip like it’s a bar, since it is one. And bring ID: most venues card at 21, and New York requires it for kratom.

The etiquette is looser than a cocktail bar and more social than a coffee shop. People talk to strangers. That’s the point.

The venues to know

Hekate Café & Elixir Lounge, East Village: candles, tarot, and the best mocktail list of the group, for people who want the ritual without the roots.

Kavasutra, East Village: the closest thing to a Florida kava bar in the city. Loud, late, and unapologetic about the taste.

Brooklyn Kava, Bushwick: the neighborhood-regulars version, with a garden out back and a crowd that knows each other’s names.

Misfit Kava Bar, Brooklyn: smaller and quieter, good for a first bowl if the East Village rooms sound like too much.

The cocktail bar isn’t going anywhere. What’s changing is the block. For a growing number of New Yorkers, the after-work hour now happens somewhere the bartender hands you a bowl, and the only thing you have to acquire is the taste.