Scoring ‘high cuisine’ in Amsterdam
AS ATTITUDES AND LAWS SURROUNDING SOFT DRUGS START TO SHIFT, SO TOO ARE THE WAYS THEY CAN BE CONSUMED. TWO CHEFS IN AMSTERDAM ARE DETERMINED TO PIONEER ‘HIGH CUISINE’. WILL ANYONE FOLLOW THEIR LEAD?
on 11 september this year, rene redzepi, chef and owner of noma in Copenhagen, considered by many to be the best restaurant in the world, posted a screenshot on Instagram of a direct message he’d received. “Hi Rene,” the first text-bubble read (Redzepi had cropped out the name of the sender). “I’m reaching out whilst in the middle of a psychedellic [sic] experience with mushrooms. Do you guys already experiment with a psychedellic take on things one way or another? If not I can totally bring some psy truffles over from the Netherlands. I feel this is BIG man.” Another bubble: “You probabaly dont [sic] need with Christiania next door.” Another: “But still.” And finally: “Dude, even totem animals. The spirit world. The dining experience. It makes so much sense.”
It wasn’t clear if Redzepi had responded directly to the sender, but he did write a caption below the screenshot. “Name someone that has better followers,” it read.
It was crazy, of course, and funny, as the 2,662 (at time of going to press) comments beneath Redzepi’s post attested; the kind of message that seems like an excellent idea to send when you’re, you know, high on magic mushrooms. But then again, maybe it wasn’t that crazy.
Across the world, often prompted by governmental policy towards the illicit drugs trade or medicinal research, attitudes towards drugs are changing (although not all drugs admittedly, or all attitudes). Since Uruguay became the first country to legalise recreational cannabis in 2013, several others have followed: Canada, Spain, South Africa, Georgia, parts of Australia and a number of the United States including California. In July, a group of cross-party British MPs who visited Canada predicted that the UK would fully legalise cannabis in the next five to 10 years. It’s not just cannabis: in May, the city of Denver, Colorado, voted by a slim margin to decriminalise magic mushrooms, or psilocybe, making it the first US city to do so, though there is a move to do the same in the state of Oregon.
In those places where such substances have already been legalised, the question is no longer how to get hold of the stuff, but how to ingest it. Increasingly popular are cannabis “edibles”, which allow you to eat or drink the cannabinoids such as THC and CBD found in weed or hash rather than smoke them. Edibles are very much the spiritual heir to the hash brownie (chocolate chip cookies! Gummy sweets! Fizzy pop!) — a high-glucose means to an end — and it’s a growing market: the industry was worth $2.4m in 2018 but is predicted to be worth $11.6m by 2025.
It seems obvious that, at the dawn of a new food-related trend, the restaurant industry might want in. Not only is there money to be made, but we are in an era of cooking that is particularly experimental. There are out-there ingredients: at Central in Lima, Peru, currently number five on The 50 Best Restaurants in the World list, chefs Virgilio Martínez and Pía León serve crispy piranha skin served on a bowl of frozen piranha heads. There are pioneering processes, such as Australian chef Josh Niland, who has gained a cult following for inventing a new technique of filleting fish “nose to tail” to reduce wastage, including using the eyeballs and the spleen.
And food is being served in increasingly bizarre, “experiential” ways: at Alchemist in Copenhagen, which I went to recently for this magazine, one of the dishes on chef Rasmus Munk’s 50-course tasting menu is ice cream you have to suck from a silicon udder (though — psych! — only one of the teats has a hole). In the current restaurant landscape, cooking with drugs isn’t so much an outlandish proposal as an obvious next step.
It is beginning, certainly. In October, America’s first cannabis café opened: Lowell Café in Los Angeles, whose backers include musicians Miley Cyrus and Mark Ronson, serves “farm fresh food, coffee, juice and cannabis daily”. Rooting around on the internet, it is easy to find private supper clubs in the US and certain parts of Europe that offer “medicated” or “infused” food, although this tends to mean — at least as far as their marketing materials admit — cooking with products such as cannabis butters and oils (THC and CBD only form with the application of heat).
But what about other drugs with psychoactive properties? Not just cannabis, but magic mushrooms and truffles and all the other fungi and plants that can stimulate and stupefy the senses? Is anyone looking at the wider spectrum of ingredients? And is anyone actually trying to make drug-infused food taste not just “edible”, but really, really good? Somebody, somewhere must be thinking about it.
Among the 2,662 comments beneath René Redzepi’s “psychedellic mushrooms” post, was a comment from the account of an American chef called Noah Tucker. He began his comment by tagging another account, @highcuisineworld, that he shares with his business partner, a British chef called Anthony Joseph. “That’s us, buddy,” he wrote. Then he added a second comment, this time tagging @reneredzepinoma too: “Maybe this is a start.”
it’s a grey, mizzly day in amsterdam when i meet tucker and joseph, who goes by “Tony”, in their small test kitchen, which is down a dark passageway under a tall canal-side house close to the city centre. There’s an island unit in the middle of the room for prepping ingredients, cupboards and hobs at the back, and at the far end of the room, a small chest of drawers in which they keep some of their more “particular” ingredients. They refer to the space as their “lab”, and it is here that they experiment with what they believe could be a radical new form of cooking. They call it “high cuisine”.
The pair met 12 years ago in a restaurant in Amsterdam at which Joseph, who is 48, tall, and comes from Stepney in East London, was head chef and Tucker, who is 42, shorter, and hails from New York, New York, was sous chef. Joseph is serious, meticulous and wears chef’s whites; Tucker laughs and swears a lot and prefers a denim apron and an ever-present shallow beanie hat. They are both married with two children and have backgrounds of cooking at high-profile restaurants: Joseph’s CV includes establishments run by Marco Pierre White such as Mirabelle and the Oak Room; Tucker worked at New York equivalents including Daniel and Jean-Georges. When they both found themselves living in Amsterdam (Joseph’s wife is Dutch; Tucker had other motivations) they decided to open a restaurant together in 2011 called Fraîche. It was there they had their brainwave.
“We were braising off wild boar cheeks with quince and some kind of hazelnut dashi,” remembers Tucker, “and I was like, why wouldn’t this take magic mushrooms right now? Chanterelles or black trumpets would go, so why wouldn’t they go? Same family, same kind of flavour profile. So then we started looking at everything, and because we’re in Amsterdam it’s right here; a 10-minute bike ride and I can go and collect those ingredients. So we just started doing that.”
Tucker, who likes to get high — he smokes a sizeable joint during our interview — says he got the idea from teenaged misadventures with friends in Brooklyn: “We used to go get McDonald’s and spike our cheeseburgers with mushrooms.” But Joseph, who doesn’t like to get high, says there was appeal for him, too, in exploring cannabis and psilocybe, but also roots, flowers, seeds and leaves with mind-altering properties, often used by indigenous, non-Western cultures for rituals or medicine.
“This new spectrum of herbs has just been opened up to me,” he says. “So from a chef’s point of view, there’s now this holy grail of all these ingredients that no one is using” (for the record, aside from piranhas, Central in Lima has experimented with coca leaves) although he admits, “not all of these things taste very nice. Some do, some don’t. Mushrooms taste horrible.”
Five years ago, they began to host what Tucker describes as “tastings” at Fraîche, after service on Friday nights. “We’d invite people over — friends, industry people — and we would do a little three- or four-courser and it would have this stuff in it, just for fun,” says Tucker. “I was curious and I think we really wanted to see what the impact was.” He was pretty sure they
were on to something. “Everybody wants yummy food, that’s not a crazy guess. But we also realised that most people like to get high. I mean, wine is the most classic pairing with food ever invented and wine does nothing else. I don’t care if you’re telling me you smell fucking slate or wet leaves or leather — you drink it because you’re going get drunk.”
They’d serve their guests dishes like sea bass sashimi, pink grapefruit, and smoked avocado with vapourised mango cannabis, or braised wild boar cheeks with toasted barley, Brussels sprouts, miso broth and magic truffle (like magic mushrooms, which are illegal, magic truffles contain psilocybin, but they come under a legal loophole in the Netherlands’ Opium Act because they are sclerotia, not mushrooms). But they’d also serve dishes incorporating blue lotus flower, which contains the psychoactive chemical aporphine; and areca nut (also known as betel nut), which contains arecoline, a chemical similar to nicotine; and Mexican tarragon, the calming effects of which are rumoured to have been deployed by the Aztecs — legend has it they blew it as a powder into the faces of human sacrifices before they cut out their hearts (let’s hope it did the trick!).
The balance was key, says Tucker. “We might start with a sativa [a subspecies of cannabis thought to be more stimulating] to get your head kind of high, then we’ll give you some indica [a more relaxing variety] to get you hungry, then we’ll give you some mushrooms, then some kanna [a mood-elevating leaf from South Africa] to centre you and help your stomach relax… it’s a bit of a voyage.” Their guests, he says, “loved it, they were game”. One happened to be a photographer, and suggested filming proceedings. “We have a ton of old footage of us plating food at 11.30 at night,” says Tucker, “and in the midst of that it was like: this is a show.”
In April of 2019, the TV series High Cuisine was launched on the Dutch video-on-demand platform Videoland. In the four half-hour episodes, Tucker and Joseph travel around the Netherlands exploring their adopted country’s culinary traditions — oyster farming, venison hunting — after which they build a menu for the chefs and producers they’ve met, adding a few special ingredients of their own. Each episode ends with a dinner party, before the increasingly heavy-lidded guests give their giggly verdicts. It has to be said, it looks like fun.
The chefs make a likeable TV double act: Tucker is freewheeling and up for anything while Joseph is quietly inquisitive and, sometimes, soberly resigned (“Imagine the show if the pair of us are high,” he says, “it’s not great to watch”). And yet they initially struggled to find a broadcaster for High
Cuisine. The subject matter was, of course, controversial, and there were some logistical issues — who would want to advertise? — plus they wanted to maintain control of the rights and the format.
“We wanted to make sure we didn’t turn it into a hippy drug-fest, a bullshit show,” says Tucker. “There’s tons of them, and they’re all cannabis-heavy, and it’s a free-for-all. They’re like, ‘OK, we’ve got super-cool ingredients, let’s make pizzas!’ And it’s like, really? You just bought 1,000 euro-worth of bud and you’re gonna make fucking pizzas with it?! Great job, guys.”
“First and foremost we’re chefs,” says Joseph. “And that’s how we come across. All this is secondary.”
(In the name of research I did watch several episodes of a Netflix show called Cooking on High, in which two chefs go head-to-head cooking cannabis-infused food for a “celebrity” panel. The judges’ feedback includes lines such as, “This is amazing. It’s shaped like a vagina!” and, “Wait, there was pot in that?! I gotta go see my PO [parole officer]!” Tucker and Joseph have seen it, too. “Cooking on High. What does that even mean?” says Tucker. “Where did they get that idea from?” says Joseph.
Controlling the format also means controlling the narrative. In the opening sequence of High Cuisine, as Tucker’s and Joseph’s voice-overs talk viewers through the show’s premise, there’s a shot of a magazine article with the headline “Too High Cuisine”, over which Joseph’s sombre voice announces, “Not all of our experiments were a success…” (I contacted the author of the article, Kees van Unen, who attended an early dinner and wrote about it for the newspaper Het Parool. “It was a complete disaster,” he told me, “people were freaking out.” According to van Unen, only four of the 16 diners lasted until dessert.) “…But we learned from them,” Joseph’s narration concludes.
“I’m not ashamed of the numbers,” says Tucker today. “Out of the 160 people we’ve probably fed, we had, like, 10 people who had a moment. It’s like, let’s take 160 people out drinking. Just drinking. Beers and wine, not even hard liquor. For sure there’s more than 10 people that have a fucking catnap, right? There’s a good 60 of us that are going down hard. So you have to look at the real numbers and you have to look at how humans’ indulgence levels are in general. We really learned that.”
“You can ask people what they’ve done, and they sign a waiver, and I have to believe that you’re good with this,” adds Joseph. “Now the people we have on the TV show are people that we know or people who have been vetted. Because if you don’t know him or me, are you comfortable sitting
‘REALLY? YOU JUST BOUGHT 1,000-EURO WORTH OF
BUD AND YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE PIZZA WITH IT?’
down with us? Think about it. Is there something in there you don’t want me to be seeing about you, or is there something you don’t want to reveal?”
I’m nodding as Joseph says all this, but I can’t help reflecting on the fact that I am with complete strangers — Tucker and Joseph, but also one of the Esquire photographers, Luke Norman, and one of High Cuisine’s producers, Isidoor Roebers — and that the whole time we’ve been talking they have been preparing two dishes for me to try. One is tiny discs of raw and cooked red and golden beetroot with an olive oil, cider vinegar and areca nut dressing, the other is miniature florets of raw and fermented cauliflower and Romanesco with black truffle (and magic truffle) tapenade. Both are versions of dishes that appear in their recently released cookbook, High Cuisine Bites (the opening pages of which contain a sizeable disclaimer).
I can’t deny that sampling some “high cuisine” had been part of the attraction of doing this story — I may even have been a bit Billy Big Boots about the whole thing — but now that I’m here, alone, and in a vaguely professional capacity, I start to wonder if being off my box isn’t quite where I need to be. So it’s a relief — though maybe still a tiny bit of a disappointment — when they inform me that there will only be one gramme of magic truffle in the dish. (In the “Dosage Advice” section of their book, they suggest two grammes of magic truffle for a “light” effect, ranging up to four grammes for “heavy”.)
“The thing is,” says Tucker, “we’re always hesitant because I haven’t questioned you, I don’t know the last time you did this. It could have been 30 years ago. [It’s 20, but still.] That means you don’t do it. I’d rather you walk away from here like, ‘I don’t really feel so much’ instead of, ‘What the fuck, man? Stop, stop, I want this to stop!’”
“And that wouldn’t be a great article, would it?” says Joseph.
(Actually, I want to say, it kind of would — “and then I threw my Dictaphone at a policeman and jumped in a canal!” etc — but I can see where he’s coming from. It’s hard to say if the dishes, which were very pretty and tasty, had any effect, but all I will say that is when I got back to my hotel room afterwards I felt compelled to watch a Friends marathon and it was way funnier than I remembered.)
Tucker, however, says he intends to take some magic truffles himself that very afternoon, even though he and Joseph would be working the dinner shift at Yerba, the “plant-forward” restaurant in Amsterdam’s Museum District of which they are two of four co-owners; at one point they had five restaurants in Amsterdam, but they sold them in 2017 before opening this one. Joseph speaks of Tucker’s consumption with quiet reverence: “He manages to do what he needs to do on a day-to-day basis. I don’t know how he manages to do it half the time, and that’s beautiful,” he says. “Also, you’ve got to remember, we work for ourselves, so if he decides to be a little wayzy, that’s OK too.” (I went to their restaurant for dinner later and, at least as far as I could tell, Tucker seemed completely fine.)
It should be noted that there are no drugs on the menu at Yerba. “You cannot serve this in a restaurant,” says Tucker. “No, you cannot,” emphasises Joseph. The law in the Netherlands means that those early experimental dinners at Fraîche had to be both private and free: while the sale and possession of soft drugs such as cannabis and magic truffles are rarely prosecuted, they are still technically illegal; ergo you can’t put them on a menu.
“You become a dealer,” explains Tucker. (They have said, however, that they plan to include a “golden ticket” in one copy of their cookbook, the lucky recipient of which will win themselves a private dinner, and yes, one of their experimental ones.)
I ask Tucker and Joseph who else is doing what they’re doing, joining their merry bandwagon. Both say that while there is a lot of off-the-record support for what they’re doing from friends in the industry, it has proved difficult to get other chefs to come and say so in public.
“I’m going to be really honest,” says Tucker, “a lot of chefs that are trying to get accolades, make names for themselves, they don’t want to label themselves with this stuff. It has a stigma, I get it. The propaganda’s been huge the last 50 years, people don’t know the truth. They don’t know much about it. But the majority, once we speak to them, they’re like, ‘Yo, this is cool as fuck.’”
There might also be a particular reticence among those in the restaurant trade, they feel, which has a particular reputation as far as drugs are concerned. They mention a 2018 TV documentary fronted by Gordon Ramsay, in which he visited his own restaurants and wiped down the sinks and toilets in the staff and customer lavatories with wipes that turn blue when they come into contact with cocaine. (“Look at the colour of that!” says Ramsay in the programme, brandishing a specimen baggie, “It’s like a J-Cloth, it’s that blue!”) “Everyone knows what it’s like within the industry,” says Joseph.
While Joseph and Tucker are waiting for the food world, or perhaps society as a whole, to come round to the “high cuisine” concept, they’ll just “keep it prevalent in people’s minds, make it the norm,” Joseph says. They hope to make more episodes of High Cuisine next year — to travel the world in search of farther-flung psychedelic ingredients to cook with — but they are entrepreneurial types and have fall-back options. They’re working on a “payment and service” app, to help address the chronic staffing problem in the restaurant business, and also intend to open a new restaurant of their own in Amsterdam next year called Heritage, based on “craveable, nostalgic food”. (And if that’s not an idea conceived by someone who likes a smoke I don’t know what is.)
It may be, of course, that high cuisine will never take off, that the legislation will never allow it to become a viable business prospect, that cooking with drugs will remain a novelty that makes for nothing more than good television. Or it may be that the other industry players, as Joseph describes it, are “just waiting for one person to legitimise it. Somebody big.”
Still, Joseph is resolute about what he and Tucker have achieved. “I’ve been cooking for 30-plus years, he’s been cooking for 20-plus. I’ve got nothing to prove to anyone. This is completely new to the game of cooking. Think about how cooking goes: nouvelle cuisine, slow food, sous-vide, molecular… What’s next? This is something that’s not been done. We’ve invented something.”
a couple of weeks after i got back from amsterdam, and just on the off-chance, I sent René Redzepi, chef and owner of the maybe-best restaurant in the world, a message on Instagram. (Hey, it’s social media, and you never know.) I explained that I was researching a piece about psychoactive drugs in high-end cooking, had seen his screenshot post in September and wondered if, jokes aside, it is something he might ever consider. I can’t say I was surprised that he didn’t reply.
In mid-October, however, Redzepi posted another screenshot of a message he’d received, again with the name of the sender cropped out. “Hi Rene,” it read. “I want to make tar tar [sic] from a beaver, how do you look at it? Can you give some advice?”
Was this was just another funny, unhinged suggestion of the many he receives, like, say, cooking with drugs? Or was it — like, say, cooking with drugs — a legitimate idea in an age of madcap culinary exploration? (Maybe beaver tartare tastes really, really good?) As before, it was impossible to know if Redzepi had responded, or what he really thought, but once again he’d written a caption. “Name someone that has better followers…” it read.
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