“It’s not for everyone,” Fat Rice chef and owner Abraham Conlon says of feni. The Indian spirit is made from cashew fruit, which resembles an apple; the cashew itself grows from the end of the pseudofruit, also called a cashew apple. Conlon compares feni’s aroma to gasoline; Julia Momose, head bartender at GreenRiver, thinks it smells a bit like acetone. But despite—and in some ways, because of—the spirit’s off-putting scent, both have put feni on their drink menus.
“We wanted it to taste better, I think,” Whited says. But “the thing about feni, if you have enough drinks it starts growing on you.” By the end of the trip—many drinks later—he and McCaslin were sold on a triple-distilled feni made by the Vaz family, longtime producers and ambassadors of the spirit. After a fund-raising effort among family and friends, Whited and McCaslin began selling it in Chicago at Binny’s last September; they’ve since expanded to other liquor stores in the rest of Illinois, Texas, and Georgia, with plans to launch in six more states this fall.
Still, Beebe-Tron and Conlon didn’t hesitate to include a feni drink on the Ladies’ Room opening menu. Called the Goan Calamando, it includes rum, Iraqi date syrup, pureed calamondin fruit (which is similar to calamansi), and roasted almond orgeat; served in a mug shaped like a Japanese raccoon dog, it’s the closest thing the bar has to a tiki drink. Her goal, Beebe-Tron says, was to “recognize that [feni is] big and wild and ripe and match that wildness.” She’s already working on another feni cocktail, and says that the next step is to make a drink that’s cleaner, more refined, less tropical. The recipe isn’t set yet, but may include grapefruit juice and a southeast Asian rose syrup made in-house.
At Fat Rice, Beebe-Tron says, “We knew that we weren’t going to immediately have people doing shots of feni. When it’s unfamiliar it can be really challenging. It’s just so new to people’s palates that it doesn’t have a place to fit.” But customers at the Ladies’ Room seem to be enjoying the Goan Calamando, Conlon says—and he now drinks feni on the rocks with a squeeze of lime. “That’s the thing about acquired tastes,” he says. “Once you acquire that taste, you love it.”
