to various high-end hospitality projects in the Netherlands, they were commissioned in 2014 to create a private‘ psychedelic dinner’ for a group of friends.
Following several months of after-hours research into recipes, choosing what herbs to use, then testing dosages and finally a try-out dinner for around 25 willing guinea pigs, an 8-course tasting menu was served in early 2015.
The dishes utilised all parts of the cannabis plant from seeds and leaves to buds, vapour and concentrates( oil and hashish). Other psychoactive herbs used included kanna( a euphoriant from South Africa), Syrian rue( a mildly-psychoactive seed from the Middle East) and cultivated psychedelic‘ truffles’, which are legal in the Netherlands to sell and consume. they had already done, prompted the chefs to team up with a writing and documentary-making duo who had been involved with the tastings. The new High Cuisine team has ambitious plans to take the concept further.
A cookbook of around 100 mind-altering dishes and cocktails is in the works, aimed at professional chefs as well as amateur cooks and‘ foodie’ psychonauts. They are also working on a series of travel / cookery shows that will take them to the countries where the exotic – and often sacred – herbs grow, and meet the shamans, bush doctors and herbalists who use them. Countries planned for the first series include Brazil, Mexico, Laos and Indonesia.
FINDING COMMON GROUND
The first episode is set in Amsterdam and uses just some of the dozens of mind-altering herbs, leaves, barks, roots and seeds available online, anywhere. The chefs meet local experts in old Dutch medicinal herbs as well as modern cannabis testing techniques and restaurateur colleagues.
Currently, new herbs are being investigated and native ingredients researched from Africa, the Americas and Asia, but also lost or suppressed European traditions of the indigenous druids and Celts, such as mind-altering herbal ales and‘ love potions’.
The overarching philosophy is that we are all indigenous to planet earth, and every society has good reasons to get high.
DEVELOPING THE CONCEPT FURTHER
The success of the meal and the amount of research
But besides providing a healthy alternative social lubricant to alcohol and an eating experience that aims to delight the brain as well as the taste buds, High Cuisine also has more serious ambitions.
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