What’s it like to sit down right down to a $295-per-person, 10-course, fine-dining, weed-infused dinner? We didn’t know both. That’s how we discovered ourselves on a late spring Tuesday night time, tucking our toes below the desk at Chris “the Natural Chef” Sayegh’s members-only Secret Supper Membership and embarking on a globetrotting, time-traveling, history-inspired, horizon-expanding journey neither of us will quickly overlook — though we will’t recollect it with an entire lot of readability both.
Earlier than digging into the scrumptious particulars of our edible odyssey (pieced collectively from rapidly scribbled notes and audio recordings), there are some things it is best to know. First, it’s a members-only scenario as a result of promoting cannabis-infused, restaurant-prepared meals isn’t authorized in California however promoting manufactured THC-infused meals similar to gummies, cookies or drinks is. (You possibly can apply for membership, which prices $1,000, through the Natural Chef web site, then pay for the dinners individually. For the needs of this story, we had been granted one-night-only memberships.)
For the report:
10:10 a.m. July 8, 2022A earlier model of this story incorrectly described a element of the Leek & Foie dish. It was a cracker product of smoked-onion meringue, not a cracker topped with smoked-onion meringue.
Second, they’re critical in regards to the secret half, proper right down to the password you’ll be offered in your affirmation e-mail (ours was MK Extremely, a nod to the CIA LSD mind-control experiments of the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s). That’s as a result of the month-to-month meal unspools in the identical Santa Monica area normally occupied by Sayegh’s Nostalgia Bar & Lounge on an evening it’s not open to the general public.
Third, you get to decide on your personal journey, THC-wise. Earlier than you start, you’re requested in your most well-liked dosage, which can be divided among the many meal’s seven savory programs (the desserts are CBD solely). You possibly can go wherever from zero milligrams — and sure, there actually are friends who take that route — to infinity and past. Ganja gastronauts who go for greater than 50 milligrams are required to signal a waiver assuming accountability, and hopefully they don’t function any heavy equipment after the meal. Certainly one of us opted for 10 milligrams of infusion, the opposite selected 50 milligrams — within the title of science, after all.
“I’ve had somebody do 500 milligrams,” our server tells us after we had been seated. Our mouths dropped. “She was completely fantastic. I might have trusted her to drive me round downtown L.A. All people is completely different.”
Sayegh has been holding infused dinners like this for years, normally in non-public properties or random industrial areas round city. He says they had been born out of a need to destigmatize the plant and to push again towards what he noticed occurring within the cannabis-meets-foodstuffs area.
“After we began Secret Supper Membership, it was actually in retaliation to what was occurring in our business and the way many individuals had been being shut down after 10 to fifteen years of placing their coronary heart and soul into creating [it],” he says, “so we didn’t actually have a theme — aside from insurrection.”
Chris Sayegh, a.okay.a. the Natural Chef, delivers a dish to diners at his Could 17 Secret Supper Membership in Santa Monica.
(Michelle Groskopf / For The Instances)
Eight years and 1000’s of meals later, he’s obtained the entire insurrection factor on lock: “We do the whole lot privately, we’re actually lawyered up,” he says about navigating the nuances of what’s and isn’t authorized. “And we make sure that the whole lot is completed by the e book.” Every of the month-to-month Secret Supper Membership meals shifting ahead — beginning with the one we attended in mid-Could — will discover a special theme.
Prematurely of our arrival, we had been knowledgeable through e-mail that our night’s theme can be “The Origins of Edibles: An Edible Tour Across the World.” It was accompanied by a drawing of a solitary silhouetted determine using a camel — keep in mind that camel; it’s not the final you’ll hear of it — towards the backdrop of sand dunes. (The theme of the June dinner was “Film Evening,” which riffed on dishes seen on the massive display screen. The theme for the following one — scheduled for Aug. 8 — is “Edio: An Edible Audio Expertise,” for which dishes can be primarily based on songs and music albums.)
Within the Natural Chef’s arms, that theme meant packing our baggage for twenty fourth century BC China and wrapping up 10 programs later in twentieth century Canada. The night’s departure platform was the dimly lit inside of Nostalgia (for the supper-club situation, extra tables had been arrange within the lounge space), and, together with our fellow vacationers, we totaled 20 in quantity, which made for a convivial however not crowded, virtually train-dining-car really feel. That, an Natural Chef consultant informed us, is in regards to the most variety of diners most well-liked for every of the 2 dinner seatings. We additionally had been knowledgeable that six of our fellow adventurers had boarded the infused-foodstuffs prepare at a earlier dinner. We sat close to one finish of the bar, the place we glimpsed among the inventive and infrequently cannabis- or terpene-tinged cocktail pairings being made all through the night time, and inside clear view of Nostalgia’s, effectively, nostalgic pop artwork: particularly a big black-and-white mural depicting cartoons from the previous few a long time, with the likes of Johnny Bravo, Ren and Stimpy and Pinky and the Mind tailor-made to the millennial gaze.
“As we go down the menu, we’re going to style by the completely different commerce routes during which hashish was handed alongside because it traveled to the Center East, India, South Africa, and so on.,” Sayegh explains earlier than we launched into our journey. “And also you’re going to see the menu get extra imbued with spices, as a result of because the Silk Highway opened up, there have been spices being traded in all places. This can be a actually enjoyable menu for us as a result of we get to geek out, but in addition it’s actually enjoyable as a result of we discovered alongside the way in which. Each dish goes to have what was out there in that sure timeframe in that space.”
Secret Supper Membership diner Prairie Rose watches a bubble crammed with stone-fruit-scented smoke land in her hand.
(Michelle Groskopf / For The Instances)
The cannabis-themed enjoyable wasn’t restricted to the menu, both, due to theatrical clouds of smoke and vapors that appeared tableside all through the night time. Essentially the most memorable of those got here firstly of the dinner, when a server floated a wonderfully spheroid, aromatic-smoke-filled bubble into the air in entrance of us. When the bubble floated lazily right into a palm held aloft, it popped, releasing a minicloud of stone-fruit-scented smoke.
Discover Stephanie’s culinary tackle every course under, adopted by Adam’s cannabis-focused (and 50-milligram-infused) ideas in italics.
