Stoney Slice's cannabis-infused Margherita pizza.
In the heart of downtown Los Angeles, you’ll find a private cannabis chef cooking weed-infused pizza à la Naples, Italy, in a wood fire oven.
The exclusive Stoney Slice exists in the liminal private-bordering-illicit cannabis chef world, where it’s not quite accessible to have a storefront, and it’s not possible to serve pizzas in dispensaries due to single-serving regulations.
“For pizza, the category doesn’t exist yet,” says founder and head chef of Stoney Slice, Kashka Hopkinson. Which is what makes the experience so unique. The pizza that Stoney Chef offers up through limited-order are made fresh and using limited quantities. Its recipes are enough to make an Italian chef swoon, with the added strength of a potent edible. The pizza is out of the box, so-to-speak, following a feature in the LA Times.
Stoney Slice’s menu orbits indulgent, elevated versions of classic pizza. Recipes include a traditional Margherita pizza with fresh Mozzarella and a light, basil-heavy sauce; a BBQ chicken pizza with homemade BBQ sauce and fresh cilantro; an indulgent dessert pizza with a layer of marshmallows and weed-infused Nutella. Customers can request the edible strength they want in each pizza starting at 30 milligrams of THC up to 100 milligrams. The chef also told me he will make pizzas that extend that milligram count for medical cannabis patients or those with higher tolerances.
I spoke to Stoney Slice’s head chef Hopkinson about his ambitions for the future, how to take his unique brand of cannabis Neapolitan pizza above ground, and what the consumption licenses are missing in legal cannabis markets.
When did you launch/found Stoney Slice?
Kashka Hopkinson: We launched last August, we just came up on a year. It started as a labor of love but it’s turning into its own thing.
Can I dine in or take out?
So the process is, we do a curbside pickup only. You order through a text message. You are sent your options, limited or preordered during the day. I don’t want to diminish the quality over quantity. It’s exclusive. We turn down orders all the time. We were aiming to work out of commercial space, but COVID happened. So we had to work out a private kitchen and figure it out.
I am a private cannabis chef. It’s the same concept as a pop-up restaurant, it has cannabis involved in it. We are working on figuring out how to get into dispensaries and make it a fully legitimate product. For pizza, the category doesn’t exist yet.
The consumption space, they ran into an issue, having made to order cannabis-infused food is essentially unregulated. There is no license that exists for it. Probably in a frozen manner, that’s the only way to have that tested in a lab beforehand.
Do you want to have a sit-down consumption space restaurant in Los Angeles?
Absolutely, that’s the end goal. I think regulations will figure themselves out by that time. Right now, everything in the cannabis industry is so finicky—rules, packaging, stuff like that. Being in the dispensaries and having a storefront where you can consume, that’s the end goal. To be able to have a pizza shop and enjoy it in that space, while it’s hot.
Nutella pizza from Stoney Slice.
Do you have a favorite menu item?
My favorite pizza has to be the BBQ Chicken Pizza, just because it’s such a unique pizza. Especially in Neapolitan wood fire-style pizza, you usually don’t get a BBQ chicken. We figured how to make a really good sauce. We use a wood fire oven and the pizza cooks quickly, at 900 degrees.
It’s Neapolitan-style pizza. If you were in Naples, Italy, that’s the kind of pizza they would serve you. It’s made with very fluffy crust. It has this beautiful char on it. We offer a 30 milligram and 60 milligram and 100 milligram option. Everyone can kinda take part in it, you can try a lighter option.
How many milligrams do you suggest for someone’s first Stoney Slice pizza?
30 milligrams is like, the sweet spot for an edible when you’re digesting. Eating pizza is more substantial, you digest this differently than you do a gummy. You have to actually digest this as a meal. So we consider all of those things while making it. Flour absorbs, the oil, the amount of fat in it, all means we metabolize that THC a bit slower.
What are the cannabis strains that you use to make the Stoney Slice pizzas?
We use whole flower, a low and slow infusion into olive oil. We use a mixture of two types of flower. We don’t say what the two strains are, it’s a nice pleasant, not heavy, happy high. A blend of two fan favorite strains. Two of the most well-received strains.
If you want to order Stoney Slice, hire you as a private chef, how do we do this?
Direct to our Instagram.
