I’m sitting at a long, lively table of guests in conversation within a San Francisco dreamscape. We’re in the front parlor of a purple Queen Anne Victorian on Valencia Street at a private supper club experiencing a culinary pairing of food, wine, and flowers.
Presented by Jamie Evans, aka The Herb Somm, the luncheon is fine dining as it’s generally understood with a twist. Along with each dish and drink at the table, there’s a cannabis pairing, outdoor-grown flowers that we “sip” through a PAX dry herb vaporizer in a new golden colorway: “Champagne mist.”
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Evans spent over a decade working in wine before she began hosting cannabis culinary experiences, getting her start at the Naked Kitchen back in 2017. The event space got its name from the chef’s table in the kitchen, where service takes place in full view. It’s a spot where Evans has hosted several events. This one is in collaboration with PAX Labs, a San Francisco-based vaporizer company.
Cannabis as a “catalyst to create experiences”
It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday in late June— a time when the city gets saturated with bright rainbow flags for Pride celebrations—and our wine glasses are full. The table is adorned with bouquets of delicate yellow, orange, and peach flowers. Bright sun is streaming in through the sheer white curtains facing the street, filling the room with light.
Guava Gift, grown by Alpenglow Farms, is served in a PAX FLOW alongside a bright spring salad dressed with a San Francisco signature created at the Palace Hotel in 1923: green goddess dressing.
“Cannabis has all these aromas and flavors,” Evans says while presenting a card of six common terpenes.
Terpenes are the aromatic compounds that convey the aromas and tastes of plants and herbs. Showcasing cannabis flowers in wine glasses, which Evans says are the “perfect vessel” for capturing their aromas, the concept is to pair cannabis’s smells and flavors to complement the dining experience as a whole.
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My dining companions are mostly female entrepreneurs, representing different avenues of creative and luxurious living through food, drinks, travel, and weed. They include freelance travel and lifestyle journalist and content creator Chelsea Davis, who hosts the cannabis travel experience Cannescape, and Haejin Chun, a Korean American chef who hosts her own series of cannabis culinary experiences under the moniker The Big Bad Wolf. Chun and Evans worked together on the cannabis cookbook: High Times Let’s Get Baked.
Sitting across from me is Karen Tartt, a cocktail consultant focused on food sensitivities who has recently added cannabis-infused beverages to her repertoire. Tartt is preparing to host a panel on accessibility in bars and restaurants at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans next month.
“Exploring how to dose and build flavor in cannabis cocktails has been a super fun and delightfully nerdy way to broaden my perspective and deepen my drink design skills,” Tartt says.
Sitting to my left is Elise McRoberts. Her brand, the Hashinista, is focused on the intersection of hash and fashion and also produces cannabis events.
“We fancy too,” McRoberts says of the lunch that pairs high-quality food and wines with high-quality cannabis.
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Events like the luncheon go a long way in normalizing cannabis consumption. McRoberts says events like this afternoon meal are essential for “exposure to sungrown [cannabis] and terpenes and getting beyond THC as a quality qualifier.”
PAX Vice President and Chief of Staff Laura Fogelman says the company doesn’t think “cannabis is the point of life” but rather a catalyst to create experiences.
Concepts like the lunch, which pairs cannabis with other luxury items, help to bring the cannabis plant to a more diverse audience.