N A RECENT FRIDAY NIGHT, I got together
with 180 strangers to get stoned.
We convened at a swank event space at
the invitation of 99th Floor, a cannabis din-
ner party pop-up company helmed by
Jeepney chef Miguel Trinidad.
“We want to destigmatize cannabis through the universallanguage of food,” Trinidad said, before sending out a tour de
force of cannabis cooking: Weed permeated the stock for the
beef shank served in a gingery broth with spaetzle and fry bread;
its flower was shaved over a carpaccio of charred, cannabis-
infused octopus; terpenes, nonpsychoactive aromatic chemical
compounds from the cannabis plant, provided floral notes to
the roasted fennel that accompanied lamb chops that had been
cooked, sous vide, in infused fat. (And my fears aside, nothing
tasted like bong water. It was all delicious.) As each course was
served, Trinidad called attention to where THC (the compound
responsible for marijuana’s psychoactive effects) was incorpo-
rated—in a smoky eggplant puree with the carpaccio, in a Bor-
delaise sauce on the lamb—allowing us to moderate our intake
somewhat. It was good that I’d talked to Trinidad about all of
this ahead of time, because somewhere between the second and
third courses, my eyeballs started feeling really weird,
and my notes from the rest of the dinner were limited
to: “Feeling great. Mirage burps. Womp womp.”
Trinidad and his business partner, Doug Cohen,
compare their approach to cannabis as analogous to
a fine-dining meal with wine pairings. “The goal is
O
not to have you hammered,” says Cohen. “It’s a journey of the
senses, an experience.”
99th Floor is one of many new businesses working to meet
the new cannabis consumer: me, and maybe also you. Thanks
to the growing social acceptance and legalization of cannabis,
the number of adults trying it for the first time is skyrocketing.
And an awful lot of us aren’t smoking it—we are eating and
drinking it.
According to studies by Arcview Market Research and BDS
Analytics, which studies cannabis consumption, the top growth
category is consumable cannabis. For the most part, that means
edibles, which is a section of the cannabis market that has
evolved far past the pot brownie (see p. 96); it also includes
THC- and CBD-infused drinks (p. 100), even ice cream. And
across the nation, chefs and diners are exploring the versatility
of the cannabis plant at the table in ways Jerry Garcia could
never have imagined: infusing foods, pairing inhaled marijuana
with food, and mining the spectrum of flavor profiles and dis-
tinct psychoactive effects of different cannabis strains.
At 99th Floor, I was lucky to be in the hands of a chef who
was conservative with the dosing, so I left the evening pleasantly
buzzed and not too high to find my way home. But it’s the wild
west when it comes to culinary cannabis, and for
every carefully dosed dinner party series, there’s an
event with a hundred people eating too many THC-
infused gummies and having a terrible night. Won-
dering how to navigate this new world? Read on.
—EXECUTIVE EDITOR KAREN SHIMIZUCannabis-infused
chocolate crémeux
and infused coffee
anglaise deliver a
literal sugar high in
this dessert from
99 th F lo or.