chartjs-plugin-datalabels: Font Awesome icons not rendering

I’m trying to show font awesome (4.7) icons as data labels, which seems like it should work because other unicode characters in other font families seem to work ok. Is there something else I should be doing besides the following?

this.options = {
    plugins: {
        datalabels: {
            color: 'white',
            display: context => {
                return context.dataset.data[context.dataIndex] > 15;
            },
            font: {
                weight: 'bold',
                family: 'FontAwesome',
                style: 'normal'
            },
            formatter: (value, context) => {
                return `\\u${context.dataset.icon_code}`;
            }
        }
    },
    ...
}