I wanted to begin with this story because something I started for our finders—our customers—ended up meaning a great deal to me. Until then, I’d simply been one of the keepers working at FiKee. This project made me want to focus more on our drinks. Now, coffee and drinks are what I look after.
“Do you have anything with cream on top?”
That’s how it started. People wanted a coffee topped with soft, sweet cream. A perfectly reasonable question: these days, almost every café serves one. They were probably surprised we didn’t. As Seosulla-gil, the street we’re on, grew busier, we heard the question more and more. Before long, some people started leaving when the answer was no.
It bothered me every time. I love cafés and coffee myself. I know what it’s like to look forward to visiting somewhere, only to leave disappointed. Some of these people had made time on a precious day off. Others were taking a break from a busy day, or visiting Seoul. They’d come to spend time here with a drink they wanted. I hated the thought that disappointment might be what they took away.
Disappointment can bring someone back. It can also keep them from ever returning. If there are no seats, or a drink has sold out, you might try again. But having to pay for something you didn’t really want is another matter. I decided it was time to draw on the years I’d spent working part-time in cafés, starting in college, and develop a new drink.
FiKee began with three keepers and a shared love of books.
The menu was small. They hadn’t known much about running a café, but they’d done the best they could. They made a signature FiKee Latte with milk infused with grain tea, and offered a carefully chosen selection of teas. Even the drinks list showed care: there were Korean wines and brandy to discover.
Still, you couldn’t call it a wide-ranging menu. It didn’t have to be. But a few things people expected simply weren’t there. To give you an idea, we still don’t serve a vanilla latte.
It’s natural to look for something familiar on a menu. When it’s missing, you wonder why. Then you have to decide again: “What should I have? What’s good here?” Some people might enjoy that surprise. Others may have come in for a relaxing break and found themselves facing one small obstacle after another. Ordering is the start of someone’s experience with us. If we cared about making people feel welcome, we had to pay attention to what they were asking for.
At first, I thought I’d make a fairly classic Einspänner: strong, hot black coffee with a layer of cream, given a little FiKee character. Something smooth and sweet, with enough coffee to keep people alert for their “adventure.” A drink we could offer anyone looking for a sweeter coffee.
I tried whipping cream with peanut butter, and with syrup, then spooning it over coffee. On a hot Americano, it was nutty and mellow—the sort of drink that makes your whole body relax. Over ice, it tasted like the familiar café Einspänner. But something was missing. FiKee, perhaps. I didn’t want to make a drink you could get anywhere.
My inexperience didn’t help. I’d occasionally made drinks to share with the other keepers, but I’d never developed a proper recipe. Where did you start? Which ingredients, and in what proportions? It needed to taste good to people other than me, and it needed to belong here. I couldn’t quite decide what to aim for.
Then Meokmaek said, “What if it tasted a bit like our signature FiKee Latte? Why don’t you try that?”
I felt like a traveler stuck at a fork in the road, with no destination in mind, when a fairy suddenly appeared to point the way. (I’m not saying Meokmaek is a fairy.) It was such a relief. At last, I had somewhere to go.
So: a sweet, toasty cream latte. Once I’d decided it should be a signature drink, the cream began to make sense. I wanted sweetness with a little savory depth, something that would work with our grain-infused milk and rich, nutty espresso.
First, I went shopping for ingredients that could bring that roasted, nutty flavor to the cream.
There are so many versions of that flavor: sesame, medium-dark-roast coffee, nuts themselves. What would work best with our infused milk? I settled on something like misutgaru, a Korean drink made from roasted grain powder. Not a ready-made mix, though. I thought that might have too much going on and overwhelm the milk. Instead, I tried roasted soybean powder. I also experimented with ingredients that could cut through the cream’s richness and strong dairy flavor.
At first, it was fun: mixing things together and trying to make the taste in my head real. I worked on it during shifts and long after I should have gone home. But developing a recipe turned out to be harder than I’d imagined. A change in proportions could completely change the result. How sweet should it be? How nutty? What tasted delicious to me might not work for someone else. I wanted something lots of people would enjoy, without losing what made it ours.
Two months of testing followed. My taste buds, my head, my enthusiasm—everything felt worn out. Numb, even. The other keepers were getting there too. How many times did I ask, “Can you try this?” Their taste buds were tired, but they kept tasting without complaint. I’m still grateful for that.
As the launch slipped further away, I started to wonder whether I’d ever get there. “It’s not bad. But is this really the right approach?” I spent a lot of time doubting myself.
Eventually, I was comparing versions with differences so small I could barely tell them apart. It was time to choose. The others told me more testing wouldn’t help: it already tasted good. With their encouragement, I finally settled on a cream latte that felt closest to the FiKee Latte, topped with nutty, sweet-and-salty cream.
After all that trial and error, we launched it in late March 2025 as the FiKee Spänner. We now call it the Adventure Spänner. People have loved it ever since. More than a year and a half later, an empty Spänner cup still makes me ridiculously proud. Some people show us a photo and ask, “What’s this drink?” before ordering. Seasonal favorites come and go, but the Spänner stays among our most popular drinks, right alongside the Americano. It’s become a real signature: something you can only have at FiKee.
Now, when someone asks whether we have anything with cream on top, I can say, “Yes. The Adventure Spänner.”
Perhaps the cream wasn’t really the point. Perhaps people simply wanted to start their own adventure here with a drink they’d chosen, rather than one they’d settled for. And if that drink could turn a little of life’s bitterness into something sweet, all the better.
Maybe that was what they’d been looking for all along.