“Cannabis Extractions Infused In Different Types Of Foods All Had Different Highs” With Chef Liv Vasquez
I had the pleasure of interviewing Liv Vasquez, a traveling Cannabis Chef and Educator based in Portland Oregon. Liv brings her experience as a chef, recipe writer, and restaurateur to the Cannabis space, focusing on plant based food and plant medicine. She creates beautiful events and exciting pop up experiences that she labels “adventure dining” where her clients are taken to exciting venues like a rooftop garden in Los Angeles or Green house in Portland, creating a new kind of experience and dialogue around Marijuana edibles.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! What inspired you to become a chef (or restauranteur)?
Thanks for asking me!
I have wanted to be a chef basically since I could reach the knobs on the stove of my childhood home. I grew up with a single mother who’s skills in the kitchen were limited to sandwiches and burnt casseroles that she would refer to as “cajun style”, so as soon as I was allowed to cook, I did. I would watch Julia Childs and The Galloping Gourmet reruns on tv and think how lucky they were to get to share their love of food with the world.
I wanted that.
What has your journey been like since first stepping foot in a kitchen?
Well…it has been quite the journey. Haha
I was a culinary wunderkind of sorts.
I started culinary school at 15, by 17 I had graduated culinary school and high school. While I was still in Culinary School, I was scouted by the VP of a theme park in Orlando to help assist him in opening the restaurants in their two new parks. I helped with floor plans, staff training and the menu for sixteen new restaurants.This was a crash course for me, learning all types of cuisine, and how to open all types of restaurants very quickly. When I was 21, I moved to New York, soon after that I was scouted by the manager of the Gramercy Park Hotel to create a BBQ focused restaurant on their beautiful rooftop with a view. The days that I wasn’t on the roof of the Gramercy, I was working at a little soup counter that i had opened with some friends in an odd space that a local building could’t rent out because it was too awkwardly shaped. From there my resume got the attention of some investors and by 22, i was a restaurateur, opening two Restaurants of my own in the newly booming restaurant hub, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Restaurants like WD~50 were feet away turning apples into molecules, and I was making dishes that were a mix of mexican, columbian and southern food, and huge margaritas. It was awesome! I had set some lofty goals in the beginning of my career and I had stopped at nothing to achieve them, and they had all come to fruition.
I was always the youngest chef in the kitchen, and I am a woman of color, so I knew that I would almost always have to stand my ground and ask for more, and I did.
Of course I backed it up with hard work and talent, but seeing women demand more was still a very foreign concept to most chefs.
I was about 27 when I sold my restaurants, it felt like I had hit all of my career goals before 30, and honestly, that was a kind of hard pill to swallow.
I found that no matter what details that I shaved off of my experience, my resume was too intimidating to just move to another cooking job. Every job I interviewed for deemed me “overqualified”. I knew that whatever my next big career move was, I would have to forge my own path, and that would take going back to the drawing board, and subsequently, a ton of hard work from there, and I wasn’t ready for that. I was burnt out. I put my chef life on pause and started stage managing for music and comedy venues. This taught me a lot about contracts, running a venue, booking events and touring, which are skills I use a ton now. After that little break, I moved to Portland to write a Food and Beverage book. Portland is a food mecca, it brought the chef back out of me. I started writing and selling recipes, while I worked in amazing craft cocktail programs. Then a funny thing happened…Recreational Marijuana became legal. So I started working part time in a dispensary, making a Cannabis College program for myself learning about the hemp plant, cannabis industry, and Cannabis absorption.
I learned that different Cannabis extractions infused in different types of foods all had different highs. I spent my time learning why something made with canna-butter has a different effect than something made with gelatin and a butane hash oil, and now I can use food as a teaching tool to educate about cannabis absorption, plant medicine and to make cannabis dosing more comprehensive.
And all of those past jobs have given me the tools to do what I do now, Catering pop up dining experiences in unlikely places like houseboats, greenhouses and rooftops.
Cooking a variety of cuisines in those early years helped develop my palate and now I am able to highlight the local fare of any place I travel to.
Years of building restaurants gave me the skills to build a kitchen anywhere.
My experience bartending taught me about the art of craft cocktails and food science but also taught me great customer service.
All of those skills that I picked up along the way come in handy when I am catering and creating events.
Do you have a specialty? If so, what drew you to that type of food?
I do! In the last few years I have become a cannabis chef, specializing in education, plant based food and proper dosing. In 2014 Cannabis became legal in Portland (where I live now), I was determined to crack the code on cannabis edibles because I heard so many stories about “A bad brownie” and I wanted to make cannabis edibles more relatable and understandable while using really great quality food.
Now I can take the three major elements of cannabis, Terpenes which are the smell and flavor of cannabis, CBD which is a non psychoactive cannabinoid, and the THC that everyone is most familiar with and create dishes that highlight those elements and their benefits. Not all of my dishes are designed to get you high, most of them highlight the natural flavors and health benefits of the cannabis or hemp plant. I found that plant based foods digest quicker and give the most comfortable edibles high so all of my events are vegan and vegetarian as of now. No other chefs are doing this type of thing, so I would consider it my specialty.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that happened to you since you became a chef?
I feel like there are so many! Haha
On my first cooking job, my head chef was a pretty scary guy….there were rumors that he had just left prison and his face tattoos made me believe it. All of the biggest, toughest guys in that kitchen were afraid of him.
He was one of those chefs that loved to yell until he was red in the face when you made any mistake with your timing.
One day he tried to yell at me over the timing of my entree.
He came behind the line and got right up in my face and started yelling like a drill sergeant, so I inched closer to his face and started singing “You Are My Sunshine” over his yelling until he stopped….then i gave him a “Boop!” on his nose. From that day forward he treated me like I was his daughter. He protected me and asked my opinion on new dishes. That experience taught me that I needed to laugh about it all, and not allow myself to get intimidated. This isn’t the army, this isn’t surgery….it is just food.
What is your definition of success?
It has changed over the years, but for me now…success means being the expert in my field.
Food gets eaten, restaurants close….but being an expert can bring opportunities throughout your career. I am someone who always wants to do more. When I had restaurants, I still wanted to write books, and host tv. Being known as the go to expert, paves the way to doing all of those things.
What failures have you had along the way? How have they led you to success?
Trusting the wrong people has definitely led to what felt like failure, but now I see that it was just pathing my way to success.
I had a business partner ,that I blindly trusted, sell the liquor license from our restaurant without telling me. (In New York you can do that.) It was a shock, and a huge betrayal, but that experience lead me to being smarter when working out business deals.
And last year I left a job where I put years of work and trust into helping the wrong people build a business and ultimately I left that job when I was demoted for reporting sexual harassment. The people I trusted had turned their backs on me in a very cruel way. When you leave a job over harassment it is almost impossible to claim unemployment. I left thinking….I need to not only survive but thrive! It was a real “I’ll show you!” moment. Three weeks after I left that job, I forged my own path in a new industry dedicating all of my time to starting my catering company Livvie Smalls Events, and I threw an amazing pop up event on a roof in LA to celebrate. Later I got help from Times Up and fought for unemployment and won. Because of that experience I began looking into how I could change the laws around cannabis consumption and spaces where you can consume. Having that terrible experience fueled me to create safe, beautiful spaces, and each event I have cooked for and organized has been more safe and beautiful than the last.
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now?
Yes, thanks for asking!
Right now I am doing a lot of catering and event planning.
(I Canna-cater events in OR, WA, NV, CA, CO., getting hired to travel to states with Marijuana legality, organizing beautifully catered meals and events.)
Next week I will be catering a Vegetarian BBQ to welcome Cannabis Scientists from all over the globe to the Cannabis Science Conference in Portland, OR.
I will also be bringing a popup to New York soon to host and cater a CBD cocktail party in a fashion showroom called “The Space”.
I am working with a lot of brands to write recipes that include their products, and educate their staff and clients about cannabis science, so you will probably see my recipes in print or attached to your favorite cannabis product very soon!
And I am also one of the faces of the SPLIFF Film Festival, a cannabis centric film festival organized by Dan Savage, so you might see me in Ads for that as well!
What advice do you have for aspiring chefs?
Be the kind of chef that you want to be and find the kitchen that nurtures that. If a kitchen doesn’t make you feel inspired or excited, it is okay to leave and find a kitchen that does.
Being a chef means a lot of hard work, long days and sacrificing your relationships and health, for a product that is gone in minutes. The journey to the plate is the most exciting part of a dish’s short life, so that journey of getting the food to the plate has to be fulfilling for the chef.
What is the key to creating the perfect dish?
Passion.
In my 20 years of cooking, I have made so many dishes, for guests, for publications, for other chef’s restaurants, and for my own restaurant and pop up menus. When I wasn’t passionate about the recipe or restaurant, my dishes were not as good as when I was making food that I was excited about.
It is said that food is a common ground that brings people together. As someone who makes food for a living, what does this saying mean to you?
This saying is so true.
I have seen so many people make friends over a good meal. In the last year that I have started organizing these dining adventures, taking people out of their comfort zone to enjoy food, I have seen that happen on a whole different level. From the 23 year old contemplating a career in the cannabis industry to the grandma who has aches that got a ticket as a gift, they all are forming bonds and conversing over my food.
You have to have a bit of an adventurous spirit to attend one of my pop ups, I give the guests an address or coordinates, they show up, then they meet the other guests, then they are picked up by transpo and taken to a party. These people are strangers in the beginning of their journey and then I see them form new friendships at the table, getting closer with every course. I love getting to witness that.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became a Chef” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
#1- Don’t take it so seriously. When I was having the most fun when I was making my most interesting dishes.
#2- Harassment is NEVER okay. Verbal, sexual or any other type of harassment or discrimination is not okay, and you never, EVER have to put up with it. Calling it out and walking away from it takes away from it being normalized.
Throughout my career, I have always made it clear that there is no room in the kitchen for abuse.
#3- Get a lawyer to look over EVERYTHING you sign. Not signing things that I didn’t have a lawyer look over has saved me before, and I have lost thousands of dollars signing the wrong deal. It is worth taking the time and finding a lawyer to help.
#4- You are not obligated to say yes to every gig. If you need down time take it. If the job doesn’t fuel you to do your best, then you shouldn’t take it.
I had a lot of the right people seeking me out, trying my food, and helping me move my career forward, and by setting boundaries and by saying “No” to the wrong environments for me, I remained on that path. I didn’t see any need to work with the chefs that yelled and threw things, which was pretty common during that time.
Personally, I wouldn’t tolerate that behavior.
I am a quick learner, very head strong and aware of my capabilities so I never allowed other chefs to talk down to me, so if that was happening I would leave.
#5- You don’t always have to do what you are told, you can pave your own path and make food the way you want to make food and people will love you for it. I have learned that if you build it, they will come. From a soup shop to building a pop up restaurant that only exists for 12 hours….people have showed up because of my passion about food. I still have people who reach out and tell me that a meal that I made for them was the best of their life. That is why I do it, to create memories around food.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Marijuana Normalization.
Hemp is an amazing renewable resource and Cannabis has amazing healing capabilities.
Cannabis can treat the damage that years of working in a restaurant can cause, from an irregular sleep schedule to back pain from standing, During my time working in a dispensary I got to see how it helped with a variety of health issues.
Most people who work in the restaurant industry don’t have the luxury of having insurance, so being able to use cannabis as medicine is a huge benefit when used properly.
My mission is to change the stigma around Cannabis edibles by teaching how to properly dose, and by creating beautiful food in beautiful and safe environments.
Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to cook for and why?
Barack Obama. I just really miss Obama, and he really deserves a relaxing dinner. I would love to teach him about CBD and the strain named after him, Obama Kush (which is very colorful and helps immensely with inflammation and back pain).
I would give him a Terpene infused Mango Sorbet Cocktail and a hand made Vegan Ravioli with a Roasted Heirloom Tomato and Masala spice CBD Sauce and show him that not all cannabis infused dishes are psychoactive. I would tell him the different ways we can absorb cannabinoids, and how he would absorb each dish, ending the meal with a Lemon Cake iced in a Terpene Infused Buttercream that tastes like the cannabis strain Jack Herer and by thanking him. Obama Care and Obama Kush helped me heal a pretty awful back injury. I love that dude!
