Feni. Jazz. Bars. And One Man’s Obsession.

There isn’t a single tiny, intimate bar that I love in India. It’s not like there are no bars I love. Sidecar is world class. But it’s large and not as intimate as Cocktails and Dreams when Yangdup used to be there everyday. I love Windmills but it’s a microbrewery and it’s also large. I love Bobs Bar but is it really a bar or an Indian take on a gastro pub? There are places with great cocktails in restaurants like Americano and Masque. So this is not to say there are no great bars and cocktails in India. Of course there are. And considering my favourite bar in the world is Atlas in Singapore, I’m the last person to say that a great bar has to be of one type only. 

But I do have a soft spot for a specific kind of bar. Small and intimate. Just a few tables. Not too many people. Great music but not too loud. A person behind the bar following his or her passion. Serving up good drinks and great conversation. A little smoky, a little dingy. But not a dive bar. Cooler and sexier, somehow familiar and international but still giving a sense of place, of the city or state or country it’s in. Like Attaboy in New York. Or the many many bars in Jordaan in Amsterdam and in the by lanes of Shumo-Kitazawa in Tokyo. Or an izakaya in the village of Yamanaka serving shochu highballs on a summer evening. In bars like these, the world compresses and shrinks and disappears into your drink, melting away like a cube of ice, and all that’s left is that moment, that time, conversation and that feeling, and the world seems both a hazy dream and a thing that is fiercely real and worth holding on to harder than you’ve ever held on to anyone or anything in your life. 

In Goa, I finally found a bar that I fell in love with after a long, long time. In a tiny lane in the old neighbourhood of Fontainhas in Panaji there is a bar called For The Record. It has two tables and a bar counter. It plays jazz (and sometimes the blues) on vinyl, while next door it sells first pressings from legendary jazz labels like Blue Note and Riverside. Coltrane gives way to Monk on a hand crafted vinyl player, every single part of which is carved or shaped or assembled by Buland, the owner of the bar and the record store, over the course of a few months. He makes the speakers himself using purple heart and teak wood that he then shapes and puts together without the use of a single metal part. 

Buland studied architecture at CEPT where along with restorations he specialised in sound and acoustics, and his obsession with sound shows not just in the record player, but on the very walls of the bar. Instead of the standard soundproofing material, his panels are made from all kinds of wood. The choice of wood in every part of the room is based on its physical properties, mainly the density, so every note is rich and resplendent, like being in an intimate concert venue. 

And the alcohol. No pina coladas and strawberry margaritas. Buland serves Indian craft spirits. That also means no molasses rum that passes for whiskey like almost all Indian whiskey. The alcohol is real. No ENA based liquor. That means Mahua and feni and Paul John whiskey and Desmondji agave. The only cocktails he makes are with feni, smoky, intense and complex drinks, like a woman you fall in love with when you really should know better. This is a commitment to quality and to a sense of place, a level of creative integrity and intellectual clarity that very few bars anywhere in the world have. 

And finally there is Buland himself. He came to Goa a decade ago to restore old churches using only the material he found naturally and nearby. Along the way he started making customised record players, obsessing over jazz, spending time with farmers and locals drinking feni and soaking in their stories. Sitting in a bar in Tokyo, wishing there were bars back home that made you feel like you had dived into a Murakami novel, he had an epiphany. To not wish and hope but to imagine and create a bar, a Goan bar, but like no bar anyone in Goa had ever dreamt of.

If you have one drink in Goa, let it be with Buland. Chat with this part Murakami loner, part dreamer from The Little Prince and get to know his story. Because he is the kind of person who changes our very sense of what is possible in our lives.