48 Hours in LA: Power vapes, $80 eighths, and gray market space cakes
We came to to Los Angeles for a big, queer Indian gala. We left with the “Maybach of marijuana” and three gray market space cakes. In just 48 hours, we’d witnessed the polar extremes of an industry divided. What started as a quick trip down to LA, ended up serving as a reminder that, despite what you might see on Instagram, the wild world of weed is still just that.
For anyone paying attention, it’s no surprise that legalization has been a bit of a shit show in the Golden State. Since adult-use became legal here in 2018, a complex web of over-regulation and excessive taxation has led to a boom in the illicit market. According to a May 2019 report in The Los Angeles Times, there are 365 dispensaries in LA advertising on WeedMaps. Of those at least 220 are unlicensed. I’d been to a couple gray market dispensaries in the Bay, but up until this trip, I’d never seen the other side of LA’s weed scene. I had no idea what we were in store for.
Our friend Ajay had invited us all down for charity gala and we were desperate for a vacation. It was for a good cause and we were overdue for a trip South. So we made a quick weekend trip of it.
We’d managed to snag a reservation at Lowell Cafe, one of LA’s hottest new restaurants and, according to God knows who, “America’s first cannabis cafe.”
I flew in a day early to hookup with some friends from my porn days. Reena and our friend Oliver got in early the next day and we all met up for brunch at The Line in Korea Town. We sipped rosé in the lush greenhouse dining room and mapped out our next two days. We’d seen bong alley, and done Jungle Boys to death. The last time we were in LA, we hit the Pottery before heading home. We’d seen the Rose Collective and a few other neighborhood dispensaries on previous trips, but there was still so much ground to cover in the LA weed scene.
We may have been invited down for a charity event, but we had selfish motivations too. We’d managed to snag a reservation at Lowell Cafe, one of LA’s hottest new restaurants and, according to God knows who, “America’s first cannabis cafe.” We’d seen so much hype about this place we had to see it for ourselves.
After brunch, we sparked up and made our way to Mister Green, a 420 lifestyle store that sells high-end paraphernalia, drug-themed apparel, and small-batch fragrances with names like ‘Hippie Shit’.
We wandered around the store for a bit nodding at the $300 bongs and limited edition t-shirts before Reena spotted a pile of acid washed kimonos, featuring a phrase in Hindi, क़ानूनी रूप, printed in neon orange above the word “ACID.” They’d just dropped as part of a collaboration with Black Weirdos, a Japanese clothing brand that inexplicably mixes psychedelic graphics with Indian iconography.
The shop boy said the symbols must mean something in Japanese. So Reena schooled him. क़ानूनी रूप roughly translates to “legalize it” in Hindi, though there’s no direct translation — it’s not really something a native Hindi speaker would say. Weird flex, but ok. We shuffled around the room a bit more and shot the shit with the shop boy before stepping back into the world.
We spent the afternoon walking around the neighborhood, trying to find a Tiki bar that no longer exists and stopped briefly to take raunchy selfies in front of the Scientology center before parting ways for the evening. (If you look closely you can see one of the church’s minions leering in the shadows of our dystopian ho photos.)
I made it to dinner without incident and ended up getting ripped on the weirdest vape rig I’ve ever laid eyes on. My mentor Dian Hanson, the woman behind the Big Book of Breasts among other outstanding porn publications, has taken to vaping exclusively out of a Storz and Bickel Plenty, which looks like a mix between a glue gun and a cordless power washer. Anyway, it got me high AF and ready for some heavily assisted beauty sleep -- after a night cap of course.
The next day, it was time to get blazed and get ready for the gala but we were running low on supplies so we found a spot on WeedMaps just a few blocks up. Reena’s hair was in media res, which is a fancy way of saying she left the house in foam curlers. When this crew gets together we turn heads, but that day we were stopping people dead in their tracks. The clerk at Trader Joe’s asked if I wanted a brown paper bag for my bottle of champagne because, as he put it, “you look fancy.” Later, a woman on the street stopped Reena to ask if wearing foam curlers in public is “a thing now.” Anyway, we were apparently a sight to behold.
We trotted our fancy asses down the street to the dispensary, following the directions to a T. When we arrived at our location, the place was nowhere to be found. Turns out, we were standing right in front of it. The lack of signage should have been the first clue that something was up, but we stepped into the waiting room like kids into a candy shop.
The budtender ushered us to a refrigerator and emerged with three complimentary 210mg “XXX Space Cakes.” She warned us not to consume them in public. The green oil seeping from the Saran Wrap echoed her advice.
Maybe it was the juvenile graffiti on the walls or the bullet proof glass partition. Maybe it had something to do with the staff’s collection of questionable face tattoos or the ball jars of weed with crudely printed cartoon labels. Whatever it was, it was pretty fucking obvious this place wasn’t above board. But, when in Rome, you do as the Romans do and in LA illicit dispensaries far outnumber licensed pot shops. I’m all for adventure, but as we filled out our liability waivers and waited to be buzzed in, I couldn’t help but think of the vape-related illness sweeping the US.
If we had any doubts we were in one of LA’s infamous gray market dispensaries, they vanished the second we were buzzed into the back room. The space was small and stacked from floor to ceiling with bootleg goods. There were knock off Stiiizy’s, 250mg edibles, and just-add-beer Micheladas in styrofoam cups, dusted with shatter Tajin. The ball jars that lined the walls were half-full of nugs no bigger than my little toe.
Our budtender, a young woman probably no older than 30, the word “Always” fittingly tattooed above her eyebrow, smirked at our request for a high THC sativa pre-roll, ideally with citrus notes. Either that or she was having a laugh at Reena’s corner store medusa vibes.
“I have Strawberry, Peach, or Champagne,” she scoffed.
The joints, dipped in oil and rolled in keif smelled about as natural as a car air freshener. We bought one of each and handed over our first-time visitor cards. The budtender ushered us to a refrigerator and emerged with three complimentary 210mg “XXX Space Cakes.” She warned us not to consume them in public. The green oil seeping from the Saran wrap echoed her advice.
By the time we arrived back at the house, the edibles had created two square grease stains on the generic pharmacy bag that held our gray market booty. We didn’t fuck with the Space Cakes but we were all in on the flavored Fire Sticks. I couldn’t tell you which one we smoked first, but by the time we left the gala we were two sticks deep and blasted. Reena free-styled in the parking lot, we staged a photo shoot in front of a generic strip mall sign, and we screamed with laughter until we were escorted to a private room karaoke bar by our concerned host. To quote Reena that night: “All I need is 5 milligrams and the sweet LA air.” She was referring, of course, to the low-dose edible she took before the gala. We’d all smoked far more than 5 milligrams.
We made two aborted attempts at karaoke before stopping in at a honky tonk bar where we stuck out like a bunch of circus hookers at a 4H convention. That lasted all of 30 seconds. That night there was laughter, there were tears, and there were Korean hot wings at the Alibi Room after midnight.
The next morning we packed our bags in a haze and headed to Lowell Cafe. We were running about ten minutes late to meet two of our all-time favorite cannabis chefs, Shruti Patel and Wendy Zeng, so we phoned the restaurant. As was the case when we’d called earlier in the week to make a reservation, no one answered.
I didn’t think much of it at the time -- the place always seems to be packed and has multiple-hour wait times for walk-ins. It seemed reasonable that they just don’t have time to pick up the phone. As it turns out, though, lack of communication is something of a signature at “America’s first cannabis cafe.”
About that title. Lowell may be the first licensed cafe in California, but plenty of cannabis cafes have come before. Back in the day, Dennis Peron, the father of legalization in California, served weed, food, and booze, out of the Island restaurant in the Castro. The weed shop he ran upstairs from the cafe would serve as the blueprint for dispensaries across the country. I’m not sure his was even the first, but it was certainly influential and pre-dated Lowell Cafe by nearly half a century.
It might not be clear from the ‘gram, but “America’s first cannabis cafe” is kind of a mess.
We’re not ones to let a little historical inaccuracy ruin a good time, but our trip to Lowell was more than a lesson in revisionist history. The food was inedible, the service was abysmal, and the weed was so expensive it had us longing for gray market Fire Sticks. It might not be clear from the ‘gram, but “America’s first cannabis cafe” is kind of a mess.
At first glance, the place feels like a natural extension of the Lowell brand, modern-meets-old-world with plenty of lush greenery and endless selfie opportunities. There’s a bold neon sign that reads “Drugs” hanging over a couple of cocktail tables at the entrance. Across the room, a wall of plants surrounds another neon sign, in the shape of the Lowell Farms mascot. Throughout the dining room, exposed brick serves as a canvas for Lowell-branded murals and on the patio, the vibes are open and airy.
Lowell Cafe is undeniably photographable. Unfortunately, as a café, it’s not particularly reliable. We spent a full hour waiting for a table. Every fifteen minutes or so, a new, wide-eyed, tablet-wielding server would appear to offer a new explanation -- we’re finding you a better table, the POS system is down. Each time they reassured us that our table was almost ready.
We were sat twice, then moved. About 45 minutes in, someone offered us a weed menu. You can’t grab a cocktail at the bar -- Lowell is an alcohol-free zone -- but you can belly up and get stoned before your table is ready. We would have appreciated the heads-up earlier on, but we were in desperate need of something to take the edge off. We ordered a pre-roll to help ease the mounting tension and perused the flower selection.
By the time they sat us we were so fucking hungry we were contemplating gray market Space Cakes for a pre-brunch snack. We ordered a burger and fries, Cobb salad, fried chicken, pork belly banh mi, and a “tomato carpaccio.” The french fries were somehow both crunchy and rubbery. The “carpaccio” was really just a pile of unripe green tomatoes and a scoop of lazily plated burrata. The Cobb was so bland that we just sort of moved it around with our forks. The only thing approaching edible was the pork belly. For dessert we had a complimentary Fruity Pebbles bread pudding, offered as an atonement for our wait. It was … just confusing.
To be fair, we weren’t expecting fine dining from a cannabis cafe. Lowell is in the weed business, not the restaurant business after all, but food this bad begs the question: Why bother? That said, food is admittedly a small draw here; let’s be real, no one is waiting in line for hours for a sub-par Cobb salad. The real attraction, of course, is the weed, and Lowell has a pretty solid selection of flower and all sorts of fancy contraptions that you have to rent to smoke it out of. Pipes and bongs run from $10 to $30 for an hour and a half. You can also be that guy and get a gravity bong at brunch for 85 bucks. Lowell provides papers, lighters, and ashtrays gratis, but everything else comes at a cost, and it ain’t cheap.
The wandering budtender, Lowell’s answer to a weed sommelier, came through with menus just as our server was putting in our order. We were too hungry to consider the options, so we asked for her favorite eighth and she pointed us to an indoor hybrid from A Golden State. We wouldn’t find out until later that our budtender was a master upseller. A Golden State, aka the Maybach of marijuana, was proudly marketed as “the most expensive cannabis flower on the market.” That shit was good. But $85 good? I guess value is in the lungs of the inhaler.
Our final weed bill -- food comes on a separate check -- came out to more than $150. In addition to the luxury weed, we paid $10 to smoke out of a Miwak Junior ceramic pipe, on loan from the Lowell Cafe private collection, natch. We also ordered two $10 cans of Cann infused sparkling “social tonic” (not to beat a dead horse, but I asked for ice three times before giving up) and a $35 XXX OG pre-roll from Maven. The food was a total bummer but the high was good, the company was great, and the space was cute, if at times confusing.
That shit was good. But $85 good? I guess value is in the lungs of the inhaler.
It’s one thing to have a selfie station at the entrance to your highly grammable weed cafe, it’s another altogether to put one directly in front of the bathroom. Maybe they figured that if you have to work that hard to get to the bathroom there ought to be some payoff -- for some reason you have to walk through the parking lot to get to the pisser. That said, if you put a fucking selfie station in front of a bathroom door, we’re taking a fucking selfie. And we did. Or at least we tried. With all of the traffic in and out, the bathroom selfie station is a minefield of unintended photobombs. That sad selfie would be our last act at Lowell Cafe. A fitting end to a ridiculous experience.
As the Hollywood sign faded into the distance, we Googled taco shops along the 101. The eight hour trip back to the Bay gave us plenty of time to reflect on the chaos of the last two days. Chances are we won’t be back to Lowell Cafe or the non-name Culver City dispensary, but the trip was well worth the ride. It’s not often that we experience such wild extremes in the Bay -- we’ve so thoroughly picked over the territory that surprises are becoming increasingly rare -- but we can appreciate them for what they are: signs of the times. On one end you have the gray market dispensary run by would-be Post Malones selling XXX Space Cakes to still more would-be Post Malones, holding down the fuck-authority spirit of the illicit market. On the other, you have “America’s first cannabis cafe,” pushing $85 eighths to tourists and influencers content with subpar food representing the future of legal weed.
The jury’s still out on whether these two worlds can co-exist. We’re just happy to say we were here to see it when they did.