The afternoon crowd at Baixela was sipping tiny coffees and digging into plates of liver and okra as I sat down for a leisurely lunch, killing time before heading to the airport. I’d heard the small bar in Copacabana was worth visiting among Rio de Janeiro’s new-wave botecos: Brazilian establishments akin to dive-y taverns with unfussy drinks and solid food, which have been, like many such venues the world over, revisited and reinterpreted in recent years. I scanned the menu, ready for one last caipirinha for the road—until my eye landed on two Portuguese words that I knew individually, but not together. Cashew Friend? I had to order it.
Brazil is home to an abundance of ingredients that are relatively unknown, or just plain unavailable, in the United States, but few are as quintessential as caju, sometimes called “cashew apple” in English. It’s what’s known as an accessory fruit, a fleshy red or yellow peduncle that hangs from the towering trees of the cashew tree (Anacardium occidentale), native to Brazil’s northeastern region. The true fruit is a distinctive claw-shaped drupe at the end of the apple, which contains a seed: the cashew nut. The nut, you probably know. The apple is near-impossible to get fresh in the States.
In Brazil, though, you’ll see caju everywhere. (It’s also grown and eaten widely in other parts of Latin America and in South and Southeast Asia.) The flavor is singular: “While it is sweet when ripe, it is also quite astringent and tannic, depending on the maturity of the fruit,” explains Ivo Ribeiro, one of the partners at Tordesilhas, which helped kick-start a new focus on Brazilian gastronomy when it opened in São Paulo in 1990. “It’s used in juices, cocktails, to accompany cachaça”—a shot and a slice of caju is a classic combination—“and in savory dishes as well.” Caju is a common flavoring for a souped-up caipirinha, and as I learned at Baixela, it also has a cocktail spotlight all its own. But the fruits have a very short shelf life and don’t ship easily, so this cocktail, the Caju Amigo, is found almost exclusively in Brazil.
At Baixela, mine arrived in a large glass jar alongside a pair of pasteles de carne and a bowl of tremoços, pickled lupini beans. Through the juicy yellow, I could see something floating murkily. Big slices of red caju, candied in syrup, gathered at the bottom. The flavor was entirely new to me: sweet, sour, with a distinctly tropical floral funk and a light pungency that I can only describe as having notes of asphalt or gasoline, but in a good way. For most Brazilians, the owners told me later, the taste is one of nostalgia.
Though its true origin is sometimes the subject of debate, the drink became popular in the 1970s as a specialty of the now-closed Pandoro, a venerable São Paulo bar, where it was made with vodka and commercial caju juice and jam. “Caju Amigo is a casual, unpretentious, simple cocktail,” says Luciana Chedid, food and beverage operations manager at São Paulo’s Capim Santo, which also has a version on the menu. “The name comes from the expression Vê um caju, amigo,” apparently a constant refrain from Pandoro customers—Bring me a caju, my friend.
Cana’s Caju Amigo
This tribute to the Brazilian classic uses orgeat and feni to replicate fresh cashew fruit flavor.
It’s now familiar across Brazil, with São Paulo still its most passionate audience. But it’s only recently, amid growing interest in retro cocktails and the Brazilian classics, that the drink has been widely reinterpreted in a more artisanal way, using fresh fruit and housemade juices and compotes. Many bars and restaurants have their own versions, and these days, you’re more likely to see cachaça in a craft Caju Amigo than you are vodka. At Tordesilhas, for example, the Caju Amigo is made with high-quality white cachaça, as well as cashew juice, preserves and syrup, which are all made in the restaurant.
A Caju Amigo made from fresh caju juice and fruit is a delicious thing, but also fleeting—often a special treat for spring and summer. “The key ingredient is a seasonal fruit, meaning it’s not available year-round,” explains Gabriela Bigarelli, a beverage consultant for São Paulo’s Michelin-starred Maní. When they’re available—only during the harvest season, between September and January, Bigarelli says—the restaurant serves cashew apples in a caju ceviche, cutting the flesh into cubes and eliminating waste by using the remainder to make a Caju Amigo with cachaça and cashew soda.
The Caju Amigo is also making its way stateside: There’s a version, heavily adapted, on the menu at Cana, a Brazilian-inspired bar in Washington, D.C., that opened in fall 2024. Founder Radovan Jankovic had traveled back to Brazil with his wife, who grew up there, many times over the years, and the couple was embedded in D.C.’s Brazilian community. Cana was born from the observation that Brazilian cocktail culture and cuisine had yet to break through in the city.
The Caju Amigo at Cana is more of a tribute than an exact replica. “Instead of relying solely on the caju fruit, we drew inspiration from tiki-style layering and created a cashew orgeat,” made with not only bottled caju juice but also roasted cashew nuts, absent in the traditional drink, explains co-founder Marko Bogdanovic. The syrup is clarified and mixed with a blend of two cachaças and a splash of feni, the cashew fruit–based spirit from Goa, India. Still, the simple idea behind the drink is the same as for its cousin in Brazil. Caju has the power to “naturally lift and enhance the flavor of cachaça,” Bogdanovic says, “as if they were always meant to share the same glass.”
