Rancho Cordova is where it started. We opened these doors in March 2013 as the first kava bar in the region, and a lot of what you now find at kava bars around the country was worked out in this room first. It's still our flagship.

From the parking lot it doesn't look like much, a storefront in a strip mall off Zinfandel Drive a few minutes from Highway 50. Then you walk in. Bamboo lights, surf footage on the screens, island artifacts on the walls, and music turned to the volume where you can actually hear the person across from you. There are booths along one wall, deep couches around a low table, and a dozen seats at the bar where most first-timers end up. No alcohol, no smoking, free wifi, a giant Jenga set that has settled more arguments than it started, and a shelf of kava books you're welcome to pull down.

Rancho has never stopped evolving. The newest chapter is the event room next door, built around a floor-to-ceiling mural, where we host live music, speakers, and community nights. It gives the bar room to breathe on a busy Saturday and gives the community a space that was actually built for gathering rather than borrowed for it.

Then there's the patio. It has a reputation of its own in Sacramento nightlife, and for a lot of our regulars it's the whole reason they come. Friendly faces, conversations that run long past when you meant to leave, and you genuinely never know who you'll find out there on any given night. Seriously.

Weeknights belong to the regulars, people coming off work who meant to stay an hour. Weekends fill up, and some nights there's live music. Students come to study on the patio. Families come in. People come alone, sit at the bar, and leave having talked to five strangers, which happens here more than you'd expect. Whoever's pouring will ask if it's your first time and take it from there. That question has been the start of a few thousand people's kava lives, and it's still the best reason to walk in.