The distinction between recreational weed use and medical cannabis has never made total sense to me. Like, if you can smoke weed and ain’t utilizing it in this historical moment? I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you.
Your deity may actually hate you.
Chef Maverick conversely, has been blessed with the task of platforming the medical line. While her delectable, cannabis-infused sauces and snacks are easily enjoyed by the pure pleasure seeker, Mav’s respect for the customers who trust her with their health is inestimable.
‘I'm just able to show my personality and my passion through my products and food. And I think that’s why people might feel that they can taste my personality through the things that I put out because for me, it’s my soul. You you get my soul on the plate. You get my soul in my products.’
The products released under the Chef Maverick brand reflect her own struggles to eat and stay well. And, as my gifted friend puts it, her soul is in the food she makes.
Her soul makes me feel well.
Pandemic-era downtown Los Angeles was hollowed out and hella eerie, in a Rowdy-Roddy-Piper-They Live sort of way.
Across decades, DTLA had come so far, to bustle in a manner that wasn’t often captured in commercials and movies. More than 200,000 people a weekday clustered in the business district, then over a March night it became something else: An extremely quiet place for the explosion of Chef Maverick as a cannabis cuisine brand.
(One of my favorite sci-fi joints. John Carpenter’s most underrated, perhaps)
You could hear Mav before you saw her if you caught her on the right day, en route to grabbing cannabis distillate from the northeastern part of downtown, on her scooter. Making a last-minute ingredient run to Ralph’s. Everything a top-tier weed chef could need is within an eight-block radius when your home is DTLA.
If you read my 2023 Q&A with Maverick, you know that she and her fiancée have relocated to Georgia, just a bit outside of Atlanta. Mav had just put on an elevated LA Christmas party for 200 when we chopped it up a bit.
Kitchen savant Chef Maverick swaps her LA lifestyle for an Atlanta base
Simply thinking “Chef Mav” transports me to another time—a period when time was plentiful and the legal weed business was flush.
And she was tired of LA. Our conversation remains among the most popular of anything I’ve posted on West Coast Sojourn. A lot of y’all know just how over this town Mav was.
In the pod ep, Mav gets baited by me a just a little bit, but a hint of remorse about the move East is undeniable. The author of Sauced Up has deals in the Caribbean and prospects in Europe, so she’s good. But she’s a food enthusiast with allergies who just left Los Angeles. Her dissatisfaction is no real shade on Atlanta restaurants; almost any connoisseur heading east with food allergies is going to get a comedown.
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to West Coast Sojourn to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
