La Hoja’s Cannabis Cuisine

Many who’ve dabbled in marijuana can recall an experience with old-school edibles, most often in the form of homemade brownies, and the story often devolves into anxiety, paranoia, and other unpleasantries. But unlike those unmeasured and over-ingested ways of yesteryear, today’s edible cannabis offerings are formulated down to the milligram — you can take as little as a one-milligram gummy to help you sleep without the slightest buzz, or enough, if you’re feeling nostalgic, to fire up those freak-outs of old.

Chef Luke Reyes must frequently explain this new recreational world to the people who come to his La Hoja private dinners, which feature gourmet dishes “lightly infused” with cannabis. “It’s been a little more challenging than I thought it would be to get people to try whatever the edible is,” said the Massachusetts-raised, Los Angeles–based chef, who brings his skills to Santa Barbara for two dinners on June 16, hosted by the Epicurean S.B. food club. “But we’re getting there, slowly but surely.”

It was his own recent experiences with edibles that made Reyes consider creating a new business model. “In the past few years, I wasn’t a big smoker, but I was using edibles,” he said. “They were very highly dosed, and you couldn’t get anything food-wise that was less than 40 or 50 milligrams. For the average person, it was a lot.”