I Ate Eight Courses of Cannabis-Infused Haute Cuisine, and It Only Made Me More Hungry
Michelin-star “special” cuisine gives new meaning to “high class” dining
By Anonymous
I have never eaten sea urchin, but I suspect this is the first time it’s been plated on top of a French toast stick. It’s slimy and smells a little bit like sea water, but I’m high, so I put it into my mouth. Thirty seconds later, a man declares, “This is food science!” He is definitely also high.
I’m sitting at a table of 30, participating in San Francisco’s first Michelin-starred cannabis-infused dining experience. Gourmet chef Michael Magallanes is infusing an eight-course meal with Nasha’s cold-water-extracted hash. But rather than being a weed dinner where guests eat edibles before arriving or smoke between courses, this meal will involve cannabis that’s present in cooking oils, purees and powders. It will be integrated into the meal like any other ingredient.
Michael is the Bay Area chef who helped bring Mourad its Michelin stars. At Mourad, he built a reputation for balancing flavors and assembling beautiful plates. This is also where he met Barron Lutz, founder of Nasha. After the “burnout of working for three months with no days off,” Michael quit the restaurant circuit to start his own personal brand — Opulent Chef. He now teaches classes, cooks private meals and works part-time for the WIRED kitchen. This leaves him time for culinary experiments.
“I don’t just want to be a cannabis chef, but if we do this now, we’ll be a step ahead of everyone.”
Michael doesn’t seem capable of excitement. All his fascinations are completely intellectualized — the thin line of his mouth never wavers across some vast emotional monotone. And yet he finds everything interesting. His detached purveyance of Oakland weed fests focuses not on getting baked but on the ravenous chewing noises of a dense crowd working their way through several hundred boxes of Costco pizza. “It got hella quiet,” he says. “It was the biggest stoner moment I’ve ever witnessed.”
Despite being the first Bay Area chef to orchestrate a full fine-dining cannabis experience, Michael isn’t particularly invested in cannabis culture. He grew up in Sacramento. “Cannabis was everywhere I grew up, but I went years without smoking weed,” Michael says. His investment is in the “cerebral experience” it can bring to a dinner. Meals are “a journey the chef takes you on,” and marijuana creates “peaks and troughs” in the experience of an eight-course meal.
“Hopefully, everyone gets high according to the level of highness you want to receive.”
Marijuana is just another experiment. “Alcohol makes people rowdier,” Michael says, “but weed is completely different.” Imagine the possibilities of analgesic fine dining. It makes you hungrier and more obsessed with texture. “I don’t just want to be a cannabis chef,” he adds, “but if we do this now, we’ll be a step ahead of everyone.”
Of course, this requires a ton of legwork. Unlike the fixed menus of cannabis-infused meals in Los Angeles, Michael worked with Barron to create a spread that is individually micro-dosed for each eater. Each of the 30 guests submits their tolerance level before the night and gets their dosage across their eight courses. “The trick is to frontload,” Barron explains, “because it takes up to an hour and a half to feel the effects.”
This is not my first rodeo with cannabis, but I’ve never consumed an edible for which the maker did anything fancier than attempt to mask the marijuana flavor. The dankness can be marginally concealed in chocolate, cookies and truffles, but I learned that it can be balanced with avocado, Fresno chili peppers and cilantro. This is the first course. The ingredients come dusted with marijuana powder and placed atop a rice cracker. As Barron says, “Hopefully, everyone gets high according to the level of highness you want to receive,” and everyone takes their first bite.
Their cold-water-extraction facility in Humboldt creates a “weed soup” where “ripe tricombs break off into the water.” The water is then “strained at different levels to produce hash that is dried into powder.” The flavor is milder. It is the “black, sticky, old-world hash” that Barron loves to smoke but couldn’t find in the US. So he made his own.
Eating the cracker is like getting punched in the tongue. Because I’m me, I accidentally sneeze and then suck some marijuana flakes up my nose. The rest of the flakes disperse. Disgruntled guests start to lick the powder off of the table cloth because, as the woman to my right says, “That’s where all the good shit is.”
The cracker’s flavor is strong, but it isn’t all cannabis. Thanks to the technique of hash creation, one that Barron describes as being “rooted in culture and the alternative lifestyle of a traveler’s community,” the weediness — for lack of a better word — is much less aggressive. Their cold-water-extraction facility in Humboldt creates a “weed soup” where “ripe tricombs break off into the water.” The water is then “strained at different levels to produce hash that is dried into powder.” The flavor is milder. It is the “black, sticky, old-world hash” that Barron loves to smoke but couldn’t find in the US. So he made his own.
By the fifth course, I am, indeed, high off my ass. I try to work out the math behind how many little plates these chefs are assembling. “Eight courses times 30 guests equals a lot of plates” is about as far as I get. It’s a pleasant high—not a rowdy, conquering-the-world high or a drowsy, roll-off-the-table-and-fall-asleep-on-the-floor high. It’s a happy middle. The textures of the foods are thrown into the highest relief. I try to eat the fifth-course oyster, but instead of sliding into my mouth, it slaps me in the face.
A few people peer jealously at my giggles. At 10 mg I probably have the lowest dosage here. Most of the guests are representatives of cannabrands, baited by the gourmet meal and pitched to by the hash brand. I vaguely wonder what I’m doing here before remembering that I am press. And that is also why I’m getting all the most beautiful plates. By the time Barron explains his product, I’m malleable as fuck. That seems to adequately testify to its potency. If I owned a dispensary, I’d probably offer his hash to my customers.
I try to eat the fifth-course oyster, but instead of sliding into my mouth, it slaps me in the face.
The higher I get, the more passive I become, and the less I want to talk to people. When the main course arrives—jujube braised beef plated on wheatberry, peas, endive and seeds, garnished with pitted, marinated jujubes — I basically pile-drive it into my mouth, deterred only by how slowly my mouth is operating. Masticating is a process. Holding the fork is a process at this point. I have never eaten a meal so delicate yet so decadent. This will probably be the nicest meal I eat in years. I savor it.
Half of the guests who were stoned before they arrived begin to pull out vapes, with no regard for indoor smoking laws. The pervasive sharing culture dominates the table, and joints get passed around. I’m a little germaphobic, so I avoid putting my mouth on the ghosts of other mouths. “They’re hot-boxing the kitchen,” I keep thinking to myself, while I stare at Michael’s ginger sideburns. I also think, “He’s been plating these dishes with giant tweezers the entire time—holy shit.”
The dishes clear out for dessert, and the room fills with chatter. People with smiles like the Cheshire Cat crack idiotic dad jokes and touch each other’s arms in the type of casual exchange one might make with a close friend. In two hours, we’ve all become friends. I’m chatting with Abby, that same girl to my right, about her entrance into the cannabis industry. “It began with social work,” Abby tells me, “and my curiosity with experiencing the world through a different lens.” I’m high, so that marginally makes sense.
I eat my strawberry angel cake and sablé in two bites. Only a fragment of dignity keeps me from literally licking the sauce off of the plate. I want more. That seems like the universal response: we want more. Everyone is clamoring for it—a decisive proof of concept of both good food and good weed. As permits for serving marijuana recreationally become available to restaurants, meals like this may become more accessible. Perhaps Michael and Barron will serve as the example for the first wave of marijuana gourmands. I approach them to share this news. They look into my enormously dilated pupils and say, “In time.”
