A seemingly endless construction project has finally concluded, bringing Feve food back online and offering a smoke-free bar for patrons downstairs.
Deli sandwiches, salads, bagels and spinach pies have all been removed from the menu in an attempt to make service better.
“We slimmed down our menu to make it better quality, better efficiency,” owner Jason Adelman said. “It was too hard to manage in the kitchen space that we have.
“We wanted to focus more on a bar,” he added.
While the menu still features items like the avocado melt, chicken finger sandwich, turkey melt, shistawouk, buffalo shistawouk and a BLT. The Feve is concentrating more on serving alcohol; the downstairs will now be a non-smoking bar.
“I’m really glad they still have the Feve burger and the shistawouk,” junior Greg Teves said.
Adelman was excited about the prospects for his non-smoking bar.
“There isn’t a non-smoking bar around,” he said. “It’s really going to bring in a different kind of crowd having it be a non-smoking bar.”
“I’ve had my hands completely in it for 10 years. I was getting really bored of a coffee house,” he continued, noting that there are now other places in town to get coffee.
“The coffee-house thing is boring,” he added.
However, the Feve will continue to serve coffee, mochas and espressos.
While there isn’t as much space downstairs, there will now be table service, with waitstaff.
“We’ll do a grand opening after we work out all our bugs,” Adelman said. Although he wasn’t sure on the exact date, he said he hoped to have a grand opening sometime after Thanksgiving.
It’s been four months since the Feve was open for food.
“We said it was going to take two weeks to do the remodel and four and a half months later we finished,” Adelman said.
Others enjoy the fact that they feel cleaner after departing from a non-smoking bar.
“It’s always a toss up when you’re thinking about what you want to do with an evening,” Casey Pickett, OC ’01 said. “Do you want to go out? Do you want to come back and have to take a shower? But now I don’t have to make that choice.”
Jason and Matt Adelman first opened the Feve in the front of the building that houses the Mandarin in May 1992. It remained there for two years before moving to its current location at 30 S. Main St. The two of them continue to own the establishment, but these days only Jason is involved in the hands-on management.
“The Feve has been around for 10 years. My brother and I started it. Everything,” Adelman said.
The Feve got a beer license and started serving beer in 1995, and then they started serving a complete liquor line for Valentine’s Day in 1999.
The Feve closed its door downstairs on July 3, 2002 to start the remodeling while the upstairs bar remained open to serve alcohol but not food. Recently, food service resumed upstairs.
“We anticipated not doing this crazy of a remodel. And then we started ripping out everything,” Adelman said. The renovations include a new floor, a curving bar and lighting. All of the renovations were made by the Feve staff except for about half of the dry-walling.
“We did everything ourselves,” Jason Adelman said. “We built the bar ourselves; we built the back bar. We cut the stone, we cut the copper, we laid the floor,” Adelman said.
Those present seemed to enjoy the chic new look.
“The first thing I said when I walked in was ‘very ritzy,’” Alexis Kamitses OC ’02 said.