FIVE STAR MUNCHIES

FROM FRENCH CUISINE IN CANADA TO BOWLS OF RAMEN AND CANNABIS - INFUSED DINNER PARTIES IN L.A., THIS CHEF DOES IT ALL.

- CHARLIE CONNELL

It wasn’t all that long ago when the only way to get a little cannabis in your diet was to know somebody who had a third cousin who had just baked a batch of flaky, flavorless brownies. After choking them down you would either not get high at all or you’d be so high that you believed you had departed planet Earth entirely. There was no middle ground.

Then Luke Reyes, along with a whole generation of forward-thinking chefs, reinvented the entire way people approached cannabis cuisine. Nowadays, it isn’t shady stoners who have no business in the kitchen trying to sneak a high into some sort of snack, but chefs planning out six-course meals with cannabis-infused dishes at specific manageable doses. That’s exactly what Reyes did when he launched La Hoja.

“At most of our dinners we don’t have you smoking a joint, we don’t approach it like, ‘Oh, we’re going to get you high,’” Reyes says. “We use cannabis just like it is an additional ingredient. That can become basically any version of cuisine, whether that’s using an element of flower, terpenes or distillate.”

As cannabis legalization slowly makes its way across the country, consumers are becoming more sophisticated about the plant and its myriad uses. But there are so many misconceptions swirling around, particularly when it comes to edibles.