Tea’z Social Walks Away From Its Moreland Kava Bar

Tea’z Social has left the Little Five Points kava bar it opened at 337 Moreland Ave. in December 2024.

Co-owners Joe Lewis and Casey Deyton bet they could teach Atlanta a Pacific root drink they had studied in Florida’s kava rooms. By September 2026, public listings marked the shop closed, after the bar told customers the brick-and-mortar chapter was ending.

Two Bartenders Bet Atlanta Would Learn Kava

Lewis opened the room with Deyton after more than 20 years behind bars and a hit to their acting work during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strikes. They wanted a change, and they wanted to know if other people did too.

Kava comes from a pepper-family plant with about 3,000 years of use in the Pacific. It does not get people drunk. It can numb the tongue, calm the body, and, on its own, taste like dirt. Lewis first tried it in college, felt nothing, and left it alone for years. After cutting back on alcohol, they tried it again, said their blood pressure dropped, and said they lost 20 pounds.

Being able to get Atlanta on board is the biggest thing. It was this ongoing education of this new concept.

Joe Lewis, co-owner, Tea’z Social

Lewis later put the mission in three words: they were trying to help “sober-ish” happen. Bartender Carmen Luse, who does not drink, said the room was exactly what she had been missing, a bar’s social life without a drunker crowd around her. She used kava as the base the way a liquor bar uses spirits, folding it into “ALT-Tails” such as Strawberries and Cream, Kava-ritas, and a Thai tea build called Thai Me Up.

Florida Built the Template They Copied

Lewis and Deyton did not invent the format. They said they were inspired by Florida’s busy kava rooms, then drove the East Coast to sit in every kava bar they could find. The Florida version is a lounge that looks like a bar, stays open late, and pours a muddy root drink instead of beer.

That pitch landed in a country that is drinking less. Gallup’s consumption survey found 54% of U.S. adults drink alcohol, matching the 2025 low and sitting under 62% in 2023 and 58% in 2024. The same poll found 17% of Americans have swapped in nonalcoholic drinks, which is the lane a kava room tries to occupy.

Atlanta was not Florida. Lewis said kava still sat underground here, even with a west-side kava bar already in town. The bet was that Little Five Points, with its odd shops and late nights, would take a full nightlife version of the drink: neon, a stage, drag bingo, and shells on the bar.

Kava Mama Opened Seven Years Earlier

Tea’z Social was never Atlanta’s first pour. Kava Mama, which calls itself Atlanta’s first sober kava bar, dates that start to 2017 in Mechanicsville, seven years before Lewis and Deyton unlocked Moreland. Its own site still lists daily hours and talks about hand-squeezed root sourced from Pacific farmers, a quieter room than a cocktail lounge with a second-floor theme bar.

TWO ATLANTA KAVA BETS

Other alcohol-free rooms around the city also put kava on menus. The split that mattered for this shop was simpler. One model treats kava as a ceremony you squeeze into a bowl. The other treats it as a nightlife product you can sell next to pizza, trivia, and a pool table. Tea’z Social chose the second model and put it on one of Atlanta’s most walked nightlife blocks.

Inside the Old Cameli’s on Moreland

The building already had a scar. Cameli’s Pizza, run by George Cameli, served its last full day on Sunday, December 11, 2022, after 26 years. Cameli said the prior three years had taken their toll and he could not continue. Two years later, a kava bar moved into the same 337 Moreland Ave. storefront and kept pizza on the menu anyway, alongside breakfast, salads, and sandwiches.

To make a pizza shop feel like a bar, the owners cleared the old booths and built a room that could work at 11 a.m. as a coffee stop and at midnight as a social hall, the hours they posted when the place was new.

WHAT THEY INSTALLED

• The floor plan: A stage, pool table, couch, and gaming area replaced the booths, with shelves of board games and a communal Switch.
• The look: Neon, fake plants, and hand-painted bathrooms downstairs, plus a smaller second-floor bar themed after Alice in Wonderland for higher-end drink nights.
• The calendar: Tuesday drag bingo, Wednesday game night, Thursday “trippy trivia,” plus live music, open mics, and talk nights.
• The extras: Kratom and k-teas sat beside kava, with coin games and a “Fun Box” vending machine as side cash, according to Lewis.

Lewis called Little Five Points a fit because the neighborhood already liked alternative shops. On paper, a sober-ish bar with drag bingo and neon is exactly the kind of weird the district sells. The hard part was still the drink. First-timers had to be walked through the dirt taste, the numb tongue, and the fact that a few sips might do nothing while a few shells loosened the muscles.

What the Federal File Says About Kava

The education job was not only flavor. Kava is legal in Georgia and is not listed as a controlled substance. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s April 2026 fact sheet still treats it as a dietary supplement the Food and Drug Administration has not approved for any medical use. In 2020 the FDA concluded that using kava as a recreational or relaxation beverage is not safe, and that putting it into ordinary foods is not Generally Recognized as Safe.

A 2002 FDA advisory warned of liver injuries tied to kava supplements, including hepatitis, cirrhosis, and liver failure. The DEA sheet notes mouth-numbing, drowsiness, nausea, and, with heavy long-term use, scaly or yellowed skin. Mixing kava with alcohol or other drugs can raise the risk of harm. America’s Poison Centers logged 106 kava case mentions in 2016 and 181 kava case mentions in 2024, with 98 single exposures that year.

Trade groups push back. The Kava Coalition points to the American Herbal Products Association handbook and argues that liver injury is extremely rare and only weakly tied to the plant, with quality and plant parts doing more of the damage. Hawaii has treated water-brewed kava as food. A customer at a Moreland bar was not standing in that fight. They were being asked to trust a new cocktail list in a city that still knew the drink mainly as a rumor.

The Walls at 337 Moreland Go Quiet

The shop was still selling the nightlife pitch in mid-October 2025, calling itself Atlanta’s newest hangout on its Facebook page. Sometime after that, @teazsocial told the room the walls at 337 Moreland might be empty but still hummed with first dates, game nights, and talks over triple shells.

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The longer note said the brick-and-mortar location would close, called it a transformation rather than an ending, and asked people to follow the next form of the project. A companion line went further: Tea’z was not closing, it was decentralizing, and “the spirit never lived in the drywall.” Regulars who saw the posts described a gut punch, and at least one visitor only learned the shop was gone after making plans to go.

THE MORELAND AVENUE CLOCK

1. December 11, 2022: Cameli’s Pizza serves its last full day at 337 Moreland Ave. after 26 years.
2. 2023: WGA strikes push Lewis and Deyton to look for a new trade.
3. December 2024: Tea’z Social opens in the old pizza shop as a daytime coffee stop and evening kava bar.
4. March 12, 2025: Lewis still names Atlanta buy-in as the central problem.
5. October 14, 2025: The bar is still promoting itself as a live hangout.
6. September 2026: Listing sites mark Tea’z Social closed.

Yelp’s closed listing still showed Casey D. as the owner and a handful of early reviews that loved samples, horchata kava, and blueberry lavender. The reviews never grew into a thick local habit. Florida can stack kava rooms on the same road. Little Five Points already had beer bars, and Mechanicsville already had the traditional kava bar.

A Meetup Club Replaces the Night Shift

What they say comes next is The Kava Club, an in-person meetup for hikes, picnics, and pours that might happen at someone’s house. “Bula,” the Fijian greeting kava drinkers use, is the send-off on the same page that says the Moreland chapter is complete. The brand is trying to keep the people and drop the rent.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The shop: Tea’z Social is no longer operating as a bar at 337 Moreland Ave.
• The pitch: Owners describe a shift to a decentralized club, not a second address.
• The older room: Kava Mama still posts Mechanicsville hours and still frames itself as Atlanta’s first sober kava bar.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Last pour: The bar has not posted a public last-call date for the Moreland room.
• The club: No steady public calendar shows how often The Kava Club actually meets.
• The lease: There is no public word on who takes the storefront next.

Lewis’s wager was never only that Atlantans would swallow an earthy root. It was that they would do it in a room built like a bar, in a neighborhood that already had bars, after a pizza shop that had lasted 26 years could not. The shells moved off Moreland. The quieter kava bar across town is still squeezing root into a bowl.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a closed Atlanta bar and on public statements about kava. It is for information only and is not medical, nutrition, or legal advice. It does not recommend drinking kava, mixing it with other substances, or using it to treat anxiety, blood pressure, or any other condition. Anyone considering kava should talk with a licensed physician, especially people who are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or living with liver disease. Figures, hours, and business statuses come from the cited company pages, listings, and federal documents and can change.