by Hannah Goldfield

There are many reasons for eating marijuana instead of smoking it—edibles give you a different sort of high, they say, and certainly delay the drug’s psychoactive effects, and pose no harm to your lungs—but flavor has not traditionally been one of them. The edibles of yore were concocted more for their potency than for their taste. Now, as weed becomes decriminalized and even legal in a handful of states, there’s a burgeoning interest in something new: really good food that will also get you high. In Oregon, there’s Laurie Wolf, the “Martha Stewart of edibles,” renowned for her cannabis recipes; in California, the über-hip chef Vanessa Lavorato sells beautiful chocolate caramels and other bonbons laced with THC, and co-hosts a Viceland show called “Bong Appétit.” (A recent episode featured Joan Nathan, the reigning Jewish-American cookbook queen, making matzo balls with fresh cannabis leaves, minced like any other herb. “It smells like parsley, absolutely,” she said.) Holden Jagger, the co-founder of Altered Plates, a “culinary collective” in Los Angeles, describes himself as a “ganjier”—a sommelier of weed. In cities like Portland and L.A., it’s not hard to find a dinner—whether a one-time special event or as part of a recurring supper-club series—featuring restaurant-quality dishes that just happen to incorporate cannabis.

Inside an underground New York marijuana dinner party

In New York, where possession of a small amount of marijuana is as punishable as a traffic violation, and distribution of even a single joint is considered a misdemeanor, the options are much more limited, and concertedly Prohibition-style. Which is why, a couple of Fridays ago, just before 6 p.m., I found myself in an alley behind a large building, the exact location of which I’ve been asked not to disclose (I’d been told where to go only a few hours earlier), waiting to be let in to a “curated cannabis” dinner. Near a small motorboat parked on a trailer, a couple dozen guests milled about, growing impatient as it grew colder and six o’clock came and went. “You guys wanna smoke?” said a bearded redhead to his three friends. They disappeared behind the boat, and soon the smell of marijuana wafted through the air.

Finally, the door to the building opened and a man led us up a few flights of stairs to a plant-filled loft (used for shooting cooking videos, I later learned) outfitted with long rectangular tables and a big open kitchen, where the chef Miguel Trinidad was hard at work. Trinidad, who runs two popular Filipino restaurants in the East Village, is also partners, with his friend Doug Cohen (the guy who’d let us in, it turned out), in an edibles company called 99th Floor. Every few months, they throw invitation-only dinner parties at which the food is infused with weed; this one, called “Higher Love,” was also Filipino-themed. (When I asked Trinidad, who is Dominican-American, how he’d ended up a Filipino chef, he said, with a glint in his eye, “Filipino women.”)

Inside an underground New York marijuana dinner party

The meal began with a drink—“Infused cocktail,” the menu read, “kombucha and rum based.” I sipped it cautiously. It was herbaceous, though I wouldn’t have identified the herb as cannabis. My prior experience with edibles was limited—a nibble of a friend’s gummy, half of a truffle purchased from a roving vender in San Francisco’s Mission Dolores Park—so, before the dinner, I had consulted with David Weiner, one of the founders of a new “media startup” called Gossamer (slogan: “For people who also smoke weed”). He and his business partner, Verena von Pfetten, had thrown a dinner of their own a few weeks before, but theirs—prepared by the chef Gerardo Gonzalez at his loosely Mexican-Californian restaurant, Lalito, in Chinatown, with guests including the “High Maintenance” co-creator Katja Blichfeld—had been completely above board. The food (chayote squash panzanella, a Brie-cheese flan) featured CBD, or cannabidiol, a chemical compound found in both marijuana and hemp. Unlike THC, the most famous chemical compound in marijuana, CBD is not psychoactive, but it’s considered by some to have relaxing and even medicinal properties, and, as long as it’s extracted from hemp, it’s basically legal everywhere. Weiner had heard about the 99th Floor dinners, and he warned me that Trinidad would be serving each person about twenty milligrams of THC during the course of the meal. Two and a half to three milligrams is roughly equivalent to a stiff drink, he said. Weiner and von Pfetten were working on “A Sensible Guide to Being Too High,” and he offered me this tip: set an alarm for an hour. “Tell yourself that you’re not gonna freak out until then,” he said. “Usually within an hour you’ll get distracted or move on to being giggly or sleepy.”

Inside an underground New York marijuana dinner party

At the 99th Floor dinner, determined not to get to this point, I took tiny, ginger sips of the cocktail. A few minutes later, as plates of crudo were served—slippery pink slices of a fish called corvina, often used in ceviche, which had been cured in a Filipino cane-sugar vinegar called pinakurat—Trinidad explained that each course contained between two and five milligrams of THC. The strain he’d used was OG Kush, which he described as “piney” and complementary to salty foods. If the meal’s cumulative twenty milligrams seemed like too much, he said, we might not want to eat all of everything. The crudo (two milligrams) was delicious and beautiful: salty, fruity, a little spicy, tart, dressed with delicate shreds of pickled daikon and green papaya and frothy coconut mignonette foam. There was THC tincture in the vinegar, and the fish had also been painted with a little canna-coconut oil (coconut oil, as opposed to olive or canola, Trinidad told me, allows for faster THC absorption), but in such a complicated and unfamiliar dish I couldn’t detect its flavor. I left two of the four pieces of fish untouched, watching wistfully as a server whisked my plate away.

Source: The New Yorker

Inside an underground New York marijuana dinner party