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Transylvanian janitor inspires Fat Rice and CH Distillery collaboration

This is a story about a Logan Square restaurant owner, a Transylvanian janitor and a family recipe rooted in Romania. And it all started with a tinfoil-wrapped plastic water bottle full of booze.

Once a year, Fat Rice janitor Ioan “Onu” Aldea goes back to Chirpar in Romania for two months to check on his farm. He tends to the cattle, pays his taxes and harvests his apple, pear and plum trees. While he’s there, he also makes tuica, a traditional Romanian plum brandy. Last year, he brought some back in a plastic water bottle for his boss, Fat Rice chef and co-owner Abraham Conlon, who liked it so much he asked CH Distillery to make it.

“I grew up with a lot of Portuguese people whose grandparents made brandy from grapes, and I was very apprehensive, like, this could be really bad,” Conlon said. “I tasted it, and I said to myself, ‘Well, this is kind of like one of the best-tasting grappas I’ve ever had.’ “

Tuica (pronounced twsweeka) is similar to grappa but not quite the same. It’s made entirely from plums: skin, pit and all. This winter marks the second annual release of Onu Tuica Romaneasca, a bright, floral, juicy spirit that gets its tangy flavor from the bitter almond pit the stone fruit is known for.

Fat Rice and CH partnered with Seedling Farm in Michigan, gathering 3,900 pounds of plums, twice as much as last year. While that might seem like a lot, it will yielded only about 300 375-milliliter bottles of pure plum wine with no sugar additives. In other words, this tuica is limited edition.

Conlon refers to Aldea as the restaurant MVP. “Look at him,” Conlon said. “He looks like a young Julius Caesar.” Aldea, 70, doesn’t speak English, and Conlon, 34, doesn’t speak Romanian, but they manage with Google and the occasional human translator. Aldea calls Conlon “sefu,” or “boss” in English, and has been with the restaurant since day one, washing windows, cleaning floors and doing whatever else keeps the retired police dog trainer busy.

“He never wants to sit still,” Conlon said.

Aldea said he’s been making tuica since he was 10 years old. Traditionally, kids in Romania handle the grunt work for their parents during the distillation process, which is done entirely by hand. He picked the plums, put them in a big wooden barrel, distilled the brandy over an open fire with logs he chopped himself and used mountain water to cool it. It’s generally made fresh for the holidays each year, when families go around caroling to neighbors’ homes, sharing the homemade spirit.

Aldea was pleased with how the brandy turned out last year. “It’s a joy for me that it came out right, like it did back home,” he said, with the help of translator Cristina Paras. “The most important thing is I did it together with sefu. We’re like best friends forever. … Even at my age, I always learn something new from sefu.”

Back in Romania, Aldea held rank as the best police dog trainer in the country from 1973 to 1975. He came to Chicago 10 years ago for his kids and helped with construction on Fat Rice before it opened.

“I felt bad,” Conlon said. “Onu was a big deal back in Romania, and then he comes here and he’s just cleaning the windows and watering the plants. So I was like, ‘Let’s make Onu famous.’ “

Conlon and Aldea are a good team. “We’re like best friends,” Conlon said. Aldea runs to the restaurant every morning to take care of the plants even when his boss tells him to stay home.

“We have a saying in Romanian: He who loves flowers loves what’s beautiful,” Aldea said. “So sefu loves flowers, so he loves everything that’s beautiful. We have something in common.”

CH Distillery and Fat Rice are hosting a release party for Onu Tuica Jan. 12 at CH (564 W. Randolph St.). It is available in 375-milliliter bottles ($40 each) at CH Distillery and Perman Wine Selections (802 W. Washington Blvd. 312-666-4417), or try it in a cocktail at Fat Rice (2957 W. Diversey Ave. 773-661-9170).