98 JANUARY 2020
T LOWELL CAFE in West Hollywood, Cali-
fornia, commercial-grade air filtration
systems line the courtyard. Curls of smoke
peep from the dining room. Oh, and the guy
sitting next to you is taking huge bong rips.
The restaurant is the first business in the
country to be granted a cannabis-consumption license. This
means guests can smoke pot and eat edibles while snacking on
vegan nachos. Industry stakeholders and state regulators are bet-
ting on its success: West Hollywood has al-
ready granted consumption licenses to eight
more businesses slated to open in the next
few years. The restaurant is the brainchild
of Lowell Farms, a Santa Barbara–based
cannabis company, and several other in-
vestors, with Andrea Drummer, a former
Ritz Carlton chef, as chef and partner.
Guests order food from one menu and
joints, marijuana flower, edibles, and can-
nabis concentrates from another. Bongs are
available for rent. Due to California law,
cannabis and alcohol are prohibited from
being sold at the same venue, so all drinks
are nonalcoholic, though some contain can-
nabis. None of the food is infused, and guests can’t take cannabis
home. The idea is to imbibe before and during your meal, as you
would with a glass of wine.
That last point is particularly important to Drummer. “There’s
no better way to normalize cannabis than by combining it with
something we do every day: eat,” Drummer says. She hopes that
Lowell Cafe will help change both the perception of cannabis
and the legal status quo. Despite more states legalizing, cannabis
arrests are rising, and according to the ACLU, black users are
nearly four times more likely to be arrested than white, despite
roughly equal usage.
Lowell Cafe is countering some of that disparity by offering a
Social Equity and Reparative Justice Program, which gives special
employment consideration to recently pardoned nonviolent can-
nabis offenders. Drummer is outspoken on this point. “Why is it
that I get to earn a living doing something normal, while other
people are doing life in prison?” she asks.
Drummer used to be an anti-drug advocate, she says. “I
thought cannabis was equivalent to heroin.” That began to
Meet Andrea Drummer, the chef of the
country’s first-ever legal cannabis restaurant.
change in 2007, when she moved to California, and later when
she went to culinary school. Cooking exacerbated her sciatica,
and when she tried cannabis as an alternative to opioids for
pain, she found it provided her with significant relief. She was
intrigued by how the body metabolizes cannabis in food form.
In 2012, she launched Elevation VIP Cooperative, which pro-
duced private cannabis dinners; Lowell Farms approached her
after she began producing a series for Spotify about such dinners.
State regulations currently prohibit her from making infused
food on-site, a restriction she hopes will eventually be lifted. In
the meantime, she creates menu items that will complement
specific cannabis strains.
After three-and-a-half years in legal limbo, she’s just happy
to finally be up and running. She is also acutely aware of her
visibility as the chef of the country’s first
legal cannabis restaurant.
“It’s a huge deal,” she says. “To be teach-
ing people and doing it at this level of suc-
cess, when I was against cannabis for so
long, it’s just surreal.” —JAMIE FELDMAR
CANNABIS AT
THE TABLE
A
“In combining can-
nabis with some-
thing we do every
day, eat—it’s two
communal experi-
ences at once.”
—Andrea Drummer
66 %
SOURCE: 2018 GALLUP POLL
OF AMERICANS SUPPORT
LEGALIZING MARIJUANA
