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Fans of chef Aliya Waldman’s Chartreuse Dinner Club have five more opportunities to enjoy her cannabis-infused dinners in St. Louis before she moves to Phoenix.
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The pioneering chef says she’s sad to be leaving St. Louis—where her monthly cannabis-infused menus have become so popular that the six-person Chartreuse Dinner Club meals sell out as soon as they’re released. She’s hoping to build an equally strong community in Phoenix, where she will be able to accommodate more guests and offer an enhanced experience.
Waldman spoke with SLM from her soon-to-be home base, where she and her boyfriend, musician Jared Mancuso of the alt-rock project Esso, were assembling a huge table. She’s midway through her first month off from hosting dinners in five years, and she’s spending the time touring, talking, and discovering the culinary and cannabis culture in Phoenix.
The Dinners
“The thing I love most about the club is doing a different menu every single month,” Waldman says. “I’m able to experiment and try new things.” That desire for creativity is what prompted her to quit her job at a large New York City restaurant in 2019 and start the Chartreuse Dinner Club, after seeing a Netflix series about cannabis-infused food. She was also newly “California sober” and missing the pleasant buzz at the end of fine-dining meals that included alcohol.
She jokes that the dinner series has allowed her the freedom to bring her imaginative 3 a.m. food ideas to fruition. “My guests like it, too,” she says. “They get to try food combinations they never would have thought of. I’ve opened a lot of palates.”
Her menus might include vegetable-forward dishes such as whipped ricotta, arugula, heirloom tomatoes, pickled red onion, and vegan caviar or a sweet corn crepe filled with whipped golden beets and drizzled with smoked beet balsamic.
Among the highlights of her exquisite seafood dishes: squid ink-miso butter pasta topped with butter-poached shrimp and furikake; mango shrimp ceviche with roasted pepper tuile and mango coulis; shiso and rock shrimp dumplings with gochugaru chili aioli; and butter-poached Chilean sea bass with fire-roasted corn salsa. Desserts have featured applewood-smoked dark chocolate peanut butter ice cream with a pressed croissant chip, s’mores pie, and lemon-olive oil cake with blueberry compote and lavender whipped cream.
Waldman started cooking for herself out of necessity in her early teens, and she fell in love with it immediately. “I realized I can provide for someone else just by feeding them something delicious,” she says. “Food, to me, has always been a source of connection.”
No matter where she travels, Waldman plans to keep the Chartreuse Dinner Club name and concept. She brought it here from Brooklyn, and she’ll bring it farther west to Phoenix. “I feel so personally connected to it—it’s like my baby,” she says.
The Cannabis Infusion
Waldman’s pandemic-driven move back to her hometown of St. Louis coincided with the legalization of recreational marijuana in Missouri—and meant that she no longer had to require her guests to have medical cards and host the dinners underground, like she had in Brooklyn.
She was the first chef in St. Louis to offer inclusive dosing. “I’ve been to a lot of dinner clubs where it’s a one-size-fits-all tolerance level, where that means I can’t eat all the food, even if it’s delicious,” Waldman says. “I have to stop myself eating at a certain point, and I don’t want that to ever be the case at my dinner club.”
Thus, she uses a tCheck home cannabis potency tester, dipping small strips that look like diabetes test strips into the oils, butters, and fats she has infused with her homemade cannabis oil. A stickler for quality, Waldman uses medical-grade cannabis. At present, one of her top choices is Blueberry Muffin. “While the name would suggest it’s very sweet, it’s very earthy and herbaceous with lemony notes, so it lends itself well to things like fish,” she explains.
Her philosophy is that the food is the star of the show and the cannabis is a supporting actor. That said, she adds, “I don’t want to cover up the cannabis taste—I just don’t want it to be typical or taste like it did in your college pot brownie.”
When guests arrive, Waldman finds out what their tolerance level is and then helps them figure out where they fit on her five-level scale, where one is 15 milligrams over a four-course meal and level five is 150 milligrams. But for guests she calls “heavy hitters,” she will go up to 300 milligrams. “It’s all about metabolism,” she says. “It’s not even a tolerance issue. It’s about the way your body processes food. Some people can’t even feel edibles.”
The Evolving Local Scene
St. Louisans can choose from an ever-expanding roster of chefs who offer cannabis dinners, and Waldman supports the scene by referring guests to other options after her dinners sell out and by consulting with people who are looking to start their own cannabis ventures.
Many of the Chartreuse Dinner Club guests are newly sober—she offers cannabis-free dining options, too—or newly California sober. She says there’s been very little pushback about the concept of cannabis-infused dinners.
“There’s a sense of community in St. Louis that I have never experienced anywhere else—and I’ve lived a lot of places,” Waldman reflects. “People here aren’t afraid to tell people about cool things they’ve experienced. I love that—and I made it part of the Chartreuse Dinner Club. I want people to be best friends with the others at the table by the end of the night—and it happens almost every time.”
To attend one of the five remaining Chartreuse Dinner Club meals in St. Louis, DM Waldman via her Instagram account as soon as the menu is released at noon on the 20th of the preceding month.
