Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week’s Cocktail, The Lusty Bonobo!

You’ll go ape over this cocktail!

A bit more elegant than the name, really.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. I like to start these articles on Monday or Tuesday, but sometimes inspiration strikes, and I need to strike while the iron is hot. In this case, inspiration struck on Wednesday, when Evan artfully described Kash Patel’s explanation of how “nothing weird is happening, they’re just changing the rules so that people who were kidnapped by lusty bonobos in a past life are not being discriminated against in the FBI’s hiring process.”

Well. With an opening like that, how could I resist? Let’s make a Lusty Bonobo tonight, folks. God knows we need something strong after this week. Here’s the recipe.

Lusty Bonobo

1 ½ oz Leblon Cachaça

¾ oz creme de banana

½ oz creme de cacao

½ oz Pedro Ximinez sherry

Stir all ingredients over ice. Strain into a Nick and Nora glass. Garnish with a dried banana chip.

This is a Bananas Foster cocktail — it tastes almost exactly like the dessert. It’s somewhat unique as a stirred, spirit-forward dessert cocktail; most sweet after-dinner cocktails are shaken and cream-based. We’ve listed it on the menu at Hemingway’s as a “Bananas Foster Manhattan” because we build it the same way as that classic whiskey cocktail. This isn’t quite as sweet as a chocolate martini, but I’d still prefer it with some flan or cookies instead of a plate of pasta.

The Internet has completely failed me when it comes to explaining this cocktail’s origins. Back in 2025, I saw an Instagram post from a bar in Mexico City describing this drink. I believe that the bar was named “Legacy.” I remember the original cocktail was garnished with a small chocolate bar shaped like a yellow LEGO brick. But I can’t find any sign of that bar online now. All I know is that I saw the basic ingredients back then and thought, “I can reverse-engineer that for Hemingway’s.”

This drink has two key ingredients. The first is the cachaça — a Brazilian rum made with raw sugarcane juice. Cachaça is extremely funky, very similar to Jamaican rum but much less fiery. I’ll tell customers that cachaça tastes like “overripe bananas and feet,” and while that seems daunting, it grows on you quickly. There’s a simple cocktail called the “El Draque” that highlights the spirit — nothing but cachaça, sugar, and muddled limes, basically a rustic daiquiri. I’d strongly recommend trying it sometime if you want to explore the weird corners of rum as a spirit. In this drink, the overripe tropical fruit — the “hogo” — melds perfectly with the creme de banana to emphasize the tropical fruit flavors of the drink.

The other key component is sweet sherry. Sherry is a fortified Spanish wine that has a sweet, nutty taste that enhances all sorts of rum and tequila cocktails. The sherry we use at Hemingway’s is super sweet, but extremely flavorful. I love the rich nuttiness sherry brings to a cocktail, but I have to fight down the sugar levels whenever I incorporate it into a drink. This is a dessert cocktail, so sweetness isn’t too much of an issue.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Ingredient shot.

Leblon Cachaça: Feel free to use other brands of cachaça; this is one of the few that’s available to me in Ohio. Use Wray and Nephew with extreme caution if you have plans for the rest of the evening. Haitian clairin is an option, but it’s deceptively strong; the last cocktail I made using clairin deprived me of the power of speech for an hour. (My wife was unamused.)

Crème de Banana: The better the brand, the better the cocktail. Gifford is the gold standard. Use 99 Bananas in a pinch.

Crème de Cacao: Always use the clear stuff; dark crème de cacao is clear cacao with brown food coloring. When you use crème de cacao in moderation, it doesn’t read as “chocolate.” Instead, it provides an earthy sweetness that’s entrancing in all sorts of cocktails.

Fino Sherry: Get the best you can afford. It lasts for months in your liquor cabinet. You won’t regret it.

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by, and I’ll make this drink for you… or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette. We’ll make it through this together.

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