Food and stoner culture have always gone together, but these days chefs and cannabis professionals are working together to find thoughtful, new ways to incorporate weed into meals.

For National Hot Pastrami Day on 14 January, a celebrated Jewish deli in Chicago teamed up with a local Illinois dispensary to give customers free pastrami sandwiches garnished with cannabis-infused mustard.

The “High on Rye” event was held in the parking lot of Ivy Hall dispensary’s Logan Square location. Customers lined up for free pastrami sandwiches from Steingold’s Deli, complete with an intoxicating brown mustard. Asked if the mustard was a one-time gimmick or the beginning of something bigger, Aaron Steingold, the deli’s founder and Jonny Boucher, Ivy Hall’s director of marketing, said they weren’t sure – but they were having a good time.

“A year ago, we did the world’s largest infused pizza with Paulie Gee’s,” said Boucher. Since then, he has been looking for new ways to test the waters and figure out what kinds of infused foods people might get excited about.

“We have a food scientist that works with us in how we could properly infuse things and then bring it to potentially market,” Boucher said.

2025 was a tough year for the state-legal cannabis industry. Investor interest has been falling, dispensaries are having to cut their prices due to oversupply, and delayed federal reforms mean that the industry is stuck in a limbo where they are highly taxed but can’t easily access banking or loans. So, it makes sense that businesses are looking for new ways to stand out and draw attention.

Boucher sees it all as a fun experiment. When he first approached Steingold, he was excited about collaborating on a bagel, given that Steingold’s is most known for them. But bagels introduce infusion challenges because they need to be boiled at high temperatures, which can deactivate cannabis. When they learned that National Hot Pastrami Day existed, Boucher and Steingold decided the answer was mustard, naturally.

“Brown mustard is definitely the traditional thing to serve with pastrami,” Steingold said. “The cannabis doesn’t really affect the flavor too much, so you’re really just getting, like a classic brown mustard flavor, which is perfect for the meat.”

“We wanted to keep as true to the sandwich as possible,” Boucher added.

Whether they’re talking about gummies or infused gourmet meals, most chefs try to keep the flavor of cannabis itself low profile.

James Loud, a cannabis breeder and former Bay Area chef who has worked with well known restaurants like Chez Panisse, has a different philosophy – preferring to emphasize the flavor of cannabis.

When Boucher and Steingold were discussing what food infusions they might try, they half jokingly brought up caviar. But Loud has already included caviar in one of his cannabis-fuelled Loud Omakase experiences.

During the last such dinner in Vegas, Loud said he “rented the Phyllis McGuire mansion and we had a big party”.

“One of the stars of the party was caviar,” Loud continued. Before eating the caviar, guests walked into a mist of “atomized terpenes”, “so you get this overall sensory experience that’s much more in depth than just the caviar or the terpenes,” he said.

Rather than infuse food with cannabis, Loud prefers his guests smoke particular strains before they eat their food. He chooses the cannabis pairings carefully based on their flavor and effect, which he said was in line with the curated tradition of Omakase – a Japanese style of dining where the chef selects each dish and diners are usually given one bite at a time.

Infusions are tricky, Loud noted, because when you try to remove the cannabis flavor, “you’re also getting rid of the full spectrum experience. And typically they’re just infusing distillate or isolate,” which, though flavorless, also offer a flatter high, because they lack the “entourage effect”.

Loud also pointed out that it’s unpredictable how long it will take infused food to have a psychoactive effect.

“I want people to feel the effects right now,” he said.

Boucher dreams of people being able to buy packets of cannabis-infused mustard and put them on hotdogs in Wrigley field. While Loud likes the idea, he said: “You’d want to eat in the parking lot, if you’re tailgating” otherwise the weed might not actually hit “until the fourth or fifth inning”

While Loud is passionate about finding the ideal way to pair cannabis with food, he said that anyone trying to make a sustainable business of it will face an uphill battle.

“Restaurants run on 5% to 7% profit. Think how much money you have to make to earn a decent living as an owner,” he said. To make that work with cannabis, there would be a whole added layer of needed expertise and regulations to comply with.

“My lawyer is constantly telling me: ‘Yeah, you can’t do that.’”