“This is likely one of the few conferences the place I can do that,” begins Chef Laurent Dagenais as he lights up a joint roughly 20 seconds into our scheduled morning Zoom. “I used to be like, you recognize what? May as properly for Hashish Now,” he says, his face lighting up with the cheeky boyish grin that’s been a key to his success as a rising social media star of the culinary world. As he puffs on the joint, a simple appeal rolls off him and it’s clear why Dagenais has amassed almost 4 million followers throughout Instagram and TikTok: Along with appeal, he exudes a sure cheffy confidence, with none pretense or stuffiness; the sort that’s made legends out of celeb cooks David Chang and Anthony Bourdain and the sort that’s earned him legions of adoring followers.
Dagenais’ enjoyable, lighthearted strategy to superb eating components and plated dishes turned the Montréal-based chef into considerably of a celeb—but he clearly by no means takes himself too critically. In his movies, Dagenais will be seen sabering champagne bottles along with his kitchen knives, playfully tossing components into scorching pans or into the arms of his chef buddies and, sure, exhaling heavy clouds of smoke within the kitchen. However regardless of an open and pronounced love of pot, he’s not a “hashish chef;” quite, he’s a superb dining-trained chef who loves hashish and isn’t afraid to point out its use as a part of his genuine self and inventive course of.
Whereas many cooks credit score childhood evenings spent within the kitchen with family members because the birthplace of their love of meals, Dagenais is fast to confess that his culinary roots had been planted elsewhere. “This didn’t start for me with the story of my Italian Nonna,” he says. After graduating faculty, Dagenais tells me he wasn’t positive what to do subsequent, so he frolicked working in a neighborhood skate store. “My mother and father had been going to start out making me pay lease with a skate store wage,” he says, so he enrolled in culinary college to discover different skilled alternatives.
“That’s when the eagerness kicked in for me,” he says. “It opened up an infinite world of information and approach.” That intrigue tempted Dagenais out of the skate store and landed him on the road in a French bistro after which working below a famed French chef who commanded the kitchen with a army brigade model of cooking. “I discovered extra about cleansing on that job than about cooking,” Dagenais says. “Nevertheless it helped with self-discipline and conserving clear and arranged within the kitchen. Earlier than that job, I used to be smoking weed and needed to get together greater than work, but it surely was like I went into the military. I did a 12 months there, which made me extra disciplined within the kitchen and in life.”
With a brand new, sharper focus, Dagenais labored in a number of superb eating kitchens throughout Canada earlier than touchdown at Araxi Restaurant, a high culinary vacation spot within the high-end resort city of Whistler, BC. “I cherished it there,” he says. “We had the most effective components and crew, however then I broke my wrist snowboarding. When? You guessed it: on 4/20! I blame the weed,” he says, laughing whereas relighting his joint. “However that was a pivoting second for me. I used to be injured, out of labor and didn’t know what to do.”
As he recovered, Dagenais discovered his method again into the kitchen, however this time, in a really completely different informal eating surroundings at one other ski resort. “Going from foie gras to nachos in all probability wasn’t the transfer, however the season cross and the insurance coverage obtained me,” he says with fun. “I took the job, but it surely destroyed my ardour for cooking in a restaurant. Nobody was enthusiastic about cooking or cared about organizing the place to make it extra practical.”
Seeking to reignite the spark, he moved to entrance of home, experimented with bartending and finally went on a visit to Thailand that he calls a “culinary journey,” full of exploration of each chili he might get his arms on. Upon returning to Canada, he secured a job on the company crew of a restaurant group the place he had nice perks, a pleasant wage and a gradual gig. “I ought to’ve been completely happy, however I wasn’t,” he says. “For me, it’s at all times been about cooking—however how can I be completely happy if I’m not cooking?”
When the pandemic shut down eating places throughout the globe in 2020, it was a blessing in disguise Dagenais says. He started exploring content material creation, first on YouTube specializing in culinary hashish, then on Instagram with clips about cooking. “I used to be having extra hype on the straight cooking movies and realized, perhaps there’s one thing about cooking with out weed,” he says. He and his girlfriend began working collectively, taking pictures and modifying movies to submit to Instagram and finally TikTok. “I wasn’t positive about TikTok at first,” he admits. “However the first video we posted to the account was a salmon gravlax. I posted it and went to mattress at 11pm. The following day, my telephone began popping the fuck off. I went from 10 followers to 100,000 in a single day.”
4 million followers later, Dagenais has hit his stride on social media, creating content material that will get views and will get him paid, all whereas doing it unabashedly in his personal method. “I’m not taking part in a personality,” he insists. “I’m not making an attempt to be a white jacketed chef—I did that. It’s not me. I’m simply making an attempt to have time, ingesting some wine, smoking some weed. A part of my success is that I preserve it very approachable—I’m not a chef in a loopy restaurant; I’m only a man in a modest condo utilizing components everybody can get their arms on.”
And a part of that authenticity for Dagenais stays rooted in hashish, even when he’s utilizing it extra as a inventive spark than the centerpiece of his cooking. “Me and Mary Jane have been shut for a very long time,” he says. “I by no means stopped, by no means stop, by no means took a break; for me, it’s a way of life. It’s at all times conserving me in good spirits, good vibes, making concepts move—and it makes me hungrier,” he chuckles, with that signature grin spreading throughout his face as he inhales one closing puff of his joint.
If you happen to love what Chef Laurent Dagenais does on social media, you’ll love the newly launched English model of his cookbook, At all times Hungry!
“It’s my model in ebook model,” he says. “It’s obtained one thing for everybody.” That includes 70 recipes, Dagenais was impressed to supply every thing from soups and salads to cocktails and desserts fitted to dwelling cooks of all ability ranges.
“I would like it to be enjoyable for folks to prepare dinner, so this has a little bit of my life, a little bit of recipes and good vibes.”
This story was initially revealed in difficulty 49 of the print version of Hashish Now. Learn it now on the Hashish Now iTunes app.
