When you walk through the doors of LEFFS (Let’s Eat, for Fuck’s Sake), it’s a far cry from the average faculty building.

Other student lounges are all crusty plastic cups and couches found abandoned in roadside ditches, but the walls of LEFFS culinary startup incubator are the clean, minimalist white of an Crapple store.

LEFFS is Sauder’s new elite pre-chef undergraduate school, like how people who are in poli sci say they’re pre-law. It’s a rarified crew of culinary buffs — think Black Mirror meets The Bear meets that Japanese reality TV show where children run errands.

When we walked into LEFFS, Mart Eeny handed us a clear glass of liquor — straight Siberian vodka — and immediately spritzed it with some sort of elixir with a motion like a cat owner trying to get their tabby to fuck off. Eeny is a culinary entrepreneur working to redefine — or mix up — how students drink.

Jungle juice, or, as they’ve rebranded it, “joose,” isn’t just a drink anymore, it’s an immersive experience.

“Instead of drinking a little here and there, I thought ‘What if you drank a little here and there but all at once?’” said Eeny. “Rum, vodka, gin, tequila, absinthe,” — he listed drink names for four minutes — “... That’s joose.”

He expounded for 27 more minutes about the top-shelf calibre of the many types of alcohol that blend together in joose to taste like a mixture of every type of alcohol.

He’s not just in it for the fame — to him, joose is personal.

“I went to a frat party in first year, but the 14 cups of cheap shitty jungle juice I drank led to events that made me unable to look several of my floormates in the eye for 4 years,” said Eeny. “I wondered: what would my first year have been like if that punch bowl had contained a complex potion of all 19 of the campus liquor store’s finest liqueurs, and if it had cost $17 for a red solo cup-full?”

At LEFFS, he’s giving first-years the experience he never had.

From the sleek stools and granite countertops of the communal test kitchen, finance jargon passed between culinary bros with the sensual fluidity of unregulated capital: Value added. Food chain. Stocks.

Unlike their business counterparts, though, they could just as easily be talking about chicken stock. Over their polo shirts, they also all wore aprons and chef hats.

“I’m actually not in Sauder,” said Eeny, despite us interviewing him solely because he’s an LEFFS student. He learned his business acumen from an unlikely source: community organizing.

“I founded a non-profit in high school to help children in underserved areas to connect with their communities through keg stands,” said Eeny, who grew up in Kitsilano.

“This was in summer 2019, before Kitsilano got gentrified.”

Now, under Eeny’s leadership, LEFFS has revolutionized drinking. Joose’s big innovation is how it engages all “six senses,” according to Eeny.

“Our drinks really make you confront sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and seeing ghosts,” said Eeny.

At first, it was scary — chefs reported seeing the ghosts of loved ones/situationships past and former concoctors of fine booze, such as frat presidents. But then, they realized these ghosts were there to help them.

“After guzzling some joose, I saw my grandpa,” said Eeny. “He told me I needed to follow my passion. I was really starting to take my geological engineering degree seriously — Grandpa would’ve hated that.”

“So I took his advice, and I continued my joose endeavours, hoping someone else would get to reconnect with a loved one by blacking out into the great beyond.”

Tickets to LEFSS’ next student-led holistic community dining event (party) are $142. Cash bar.