A fine dining chef gave up a restaurant career for marijuana-plant-to-table cuisine

(LATimes) It’s been almost a year since Jagger launched Altered Plates, the name of both his chef-grown cannabis dinners and his forthcoming Web series. A seat at one of his dinners will cost you $500, a price that includes a five-course meal, wine pairings and a pre-rolled joint to go with every dish. As is customary in luxury dining, at the end of the night guests take home parting gifts from the kitchen, but instead of a pastry, they leave with cannabis-laced caramel corn and custom blended teas that feature a mix of tea and cannabis leaves, and a THC-spiked sugar cube complete with dosing instructions. The dinners, which are smallish — eight to ten guests — are held in private homes. A weed sommelier is referred to as a ganjier, and Jagger plays this role too. Before a dish of braised quail with pomegranates and delicate squash, he instructs his diners to take a terpene pull, which means inhaling on the unlit joint to experience the aromatic compounds, or terpenes, found in the essential oils of the herb. “This fresh bud almost has a 7-Up quality to it,” he says of the joint, which is rolled with a variety called Wish Mountain, “but at the same time it’s got notes of cherry, toasted nuts and citruses.”