What happens when you scoff a psychedelic cannabis-based tasting menu stuffed with hashish, bud and trippy truffles?
When was the last time you felt trepidation prior to eating in a restaurant? Not the social anxiety of a first date or dining with your boss, but a soupçon of nervousness about the food itself. I’m at Fraîche, a cosy restaurant in Amsterdam’s hip Jordaan district, where chefs and co-owners Noah Tucker and Tony Joseph are laying on an eight-course psychedelic dinner, $80 (£50) a head, for 25 invited guests. Alhough each course has been carefully tested for taste and potency over the previous few months, it is the first time they have all been combined in one dinner. We are guinea pigs.
But we’re in safe hands. Tucker, a native New Yorker who relocated to Amsterdam, is a self-professed “highly functional pothead”. He has been cooking since the age of six, and attended culinary school on a US navy scholarship. Joseph is a specialist patissier from London who doesn’t touch drugs. As a longtime resident of Amsterdam, I am au fait with the upcoming cannabis ingredients (though I admit to being flattened by dodgy hash brownies in the past). In addition to three types of hashish and four varieties of bud, there are psychedelic truffles, the kanna and the Syrian rue: herbal novelties I am unfamiliar with. Manas Akdag from Test Lab, the city’s only non-governmental cannabis tester, is in effect our “weed sommelier”, and has advised the chefs which varieties work best with which dishes, explaining the difference between high-altitude Indica hashes from Nepal and Tibet, and low-altitude from Morocco, which weeds have high levels of THCV (fast-acting, short-lasting euphoric high) and other cannab-arcana.
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