It’s not typical to go out for some fine dining and to leave feeling hungry, but then Miguel Trinidad doesn’t offer your usual fare. The New York City-based executive chef has won a growing reputation for his creative use of a not-so-secret sauce: cannabis.
“You do get the munchies afterward,” one participant said of Trinidad’s in-demand weed-infused dining experiences, telling the New York Times for a major profile that she and a friend went out for pizza after their meal.
For almost a decade until this year, Trinidad and his former business partner were major pioneers of high-end cannabis cooking through their 99th Floor meals served at popup locations around NYC. While Trinidad’s menus created a lot of media buzz (pun intended), there was a serious mission behind his work.
“I wanted to show my community that it’s not the devil’s lettuce.”
“I wanted to destigmatize cannabis” and promote its health and wellness properties, he says. “I wanted to show my community that it’s not the devil’s lettuce.” Carefully woven into different recipes, cannabis can reduce anxiety, improve mood and heighten a sense of well-being, all without leaving you stoned.
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Trinidad speaks of the benefits from personal and family experience. As a chef, working on his feet for long hours every day, he struggled with knee and lower back pain for a long time before finding a cannabis-infused freeze spray that would take the edge off.
His early interest in the benefits of marijuana was stirred by his mom’s struggles. At one point she was taking more than a dozen medications a day, feeling depressed and sleeping a lot without finding much relief. Overcoming her initial reluctance—“she’s this old-school Latina who thinks, ‘If I smoke weed, I’m going to be selling it on the corner’”—she tried edibles. Very soon “she was in a much better mood, and she wasn’t feeling any pain.”
Getting giggly
Cannabis cooking doesn’t follow a cookie-cutter recipe. There are tinctures, distillates and powders that work better in different foods and in different amounts. Then it’s important to match the right strain with the right food, almost like pairing a wine. Getting the dose just right is critical too, requiring keen nutritional knowledge.
“How fast is it going to hit?” Trinidad says by way of example. “What are you eating, and how is that vessel going to affect you when you eat it? If you’re going to eat a salad and you’re having a dressing, it’s going to go much quicker into your system than if you’re having rice and beans that are infused.”
“There’s a lot of experimenting and playing around with stuff.”
All those variables mean that “there’s a lot of experimenting and playing around with stuff,” he admits (which can mean being “giggly for days at a time.”) He had an early lesson on the critical nature of getting the dose right when he tried making candies for the first time. He mistakenly used ten times the amount recommended: “I had to go home because it was very uncomfortable. I’m trying to open the door to the apartment with the paranoia setting in; not a nice feeling.”
Still, the aim of incorporating cannabis isn’t to overwhelm but to enhance. “For me and the experience that we provide, we want people to come in and have a really good time,” Trinidad says. “Not come in to get, you know, lit and stumble out. I compare it to drinking a bottle of wine over two hours by yourself.”
That’s a long way from Trinidad’s early experiences with weed. He recalls making some cannabis cookies when he was a teen and giving one to a cousin who ate it “and was literally passed out on my couch for eight hours. He has never touched it again and attributes that to me . . . I didn’t know what I was doing.”
As a young person, “it was all uncharted territory,” he remembers. “You ate the whole brownie, and you were holding in for hours: like, ‘When is this going to end?’ And who wants to have that experience over and over again, right? So, when I was presented with the opportunity to cook with cannabis, I wanted to be extremely responsible, and I wanted to make sure that the experience for everyone who came in was a pleasurable one.”
Italian inspiration
One of the biggest misconceptions Trinidad battles is that marijuana is super addictive. “Cannabis isn’t addictive,” he says. “There are no addictive properties behind it.” Contrast that with the opioids people take for pain—they ease the hurt for a time, but they don’t cure anything, he notes. “And once it wears off, you need a stronger dose.”
Meanwhile, with cannabis, “even a small dose, one hit, will make you feel good. You don’t need to smoke a whole joint. You don’t need to smoke a whole ounce. You’re only going to get so high.”
Trinidad’s dope dinners haven’t just attracted regular marijuana users. One guest was a middle-aged musician, a vegan, who had never tried cannabis once. “So, I was very careful with dosing,” says Trinidad. His food was a hit: the usually introverted man mellowed out and socialized with others at the meal he did not know and called the next day to say thank you. “He said he went home and wrote music for hours . . . how it just really opened up his mind.”
Parents have attended the marijuana meals with their grown children, with the elders “leaving with this open mind. It’s a beautiful experience and something that they have shared, and which has brought them closer together,” Trinidad says. “That motivates me to keep going. I am still praying for the day that my mother says, ‘I want to come and sit at one of your dinners.’”
While continuing to promote the culinary use of marijuana, Trinidad is now taking some of that creativity and infusing it into the food served up at Marie’s. The Italian-themed restaurant he opened in Bushwick in March features homemade pastas blended with other cuisines in Trinidad’s trademark experimentation.
His distinctive style has been refined over almost 20 years in the restaurant business. After training at the Institute of Culinary Education in NYC, Trinidad was executive chef/owner of two Filipino-themed eateries before cofounding 99th Floor. In 2019 he was nominated for a prestigious James Beard restaurant industry award for his cookbook I Am a Filipino, coauthored with Nicole Ponseca.
Now at Marie’s, “I’m taking Latino flavors, flavors that were in the neighborhood, paying respect to them [but in a way that is] exciting and new.” Weed-seasoned food remains a focus, though, with a product line in the works. “I want to be like the Stouffer’s or the Paul Newman of cannabis cuisine,” says Trinidad, “where we can give these meals to patients that are in pain at no cost, and they can get nutrition, and they can get medication without having to depend on Big Pharma.”
As both a minority and someone who has carved a niche for himself in the food industry, what advice does Trinidad have for others with a dream of making a difference? “Don’t be afraid,” he says. “Own your truth and push it to the best of your ability. And when you fall, get back up. Get back up and do it again. Because it’s through all these trials and tribulations we succeed . . . throughout all the challenges that are presented to us, we persevere.”
From an interview with Jasmine Jordan
