High on Pie: We Tried New York’s Cannabis-Infused Pizza

by: Keegan MacDonald | on March 27, 2019 | No Comments

The first thing I want to mention about Stoned Pizza, the New York City pizza delivery service that will bring a THC-infused pie of Sicilian-style slices right to your door, is that it is not a scam. It really works.

This is not a scam. They really will deliver infused pizza to your door.

In the gray market that exists for cannabis products in New York City right now there’s always the potential to get suckered. Exhibit A: those garish marijuana lollipop vans you see every now and again, vans that I can say with confidence don’t actually sell anything worth buying unless you really love sweets. So on that count, Stoned is already worth it.

How does it all go down? Pretty easily.

First you submit your info for a menu and a phone number. Then you text your order, making sure to hit the minimum, which for me was $150 out here near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I went for a pepperoni pie, a vegan pie and an order of ganja knots (it’s what they call garlic knots), along with a cheesecake stuffed in a mason jar.

Then you wait around until you get a phone call asking for you by your Instagram handle. You go downstairs and meet your delivery person, who’s keeping your pizza and ganja knots warm in a traditional pizza delivery bag.

Then you wait for your friends to show up.

This Ain’t Microdosing

Here’s what you get in the box.

Each eight-slice pie comes infused with 320mg of THC. There seems to be a minor discrepancy, as the menu promises 340mg but the pizza box says 320. Whatever. Each six-piece order of ganja knots contains a total of 100 mg of infused THC. 320mg or 340mg per pie, that’s about 40mg per slice. Which seems like a lot even for an experienced cannabis connoisseur. (New York isn’t yet a legal state, but infused edibles in places like California and Colorado are limited to 100mg per package, and 10mg per serving, just for context.)

The pizzas definitely seem more like the kind of thing you get for a big party rather than a thing you get for having a few friends over so they can see Putney Swope for the first time ever like I was doing, but on the other hand, fewer people mean more leftovers for you.

Better Than Original Ray’s?

So how did it taste? Our reviews were mixed.

One friend of mine who came over described the vegan pie as tasting like “pizza from a bakery that also boasts they have pizza.” Maybe a little harsh, and to be fair, the pizza had sat around for a half-hour or so before everyone got to my apartment to eat it.

For me, the pepperoni pie tasted pretty solidly like a Sicilian slice, though the ganja knot I ate was a little too doughy for my liking. Except for the cheesecake, you don’t get more than the occasional hint of the active ingredient in your food.

Don’t Dowd This, Dude

There was some debate about how much pizza people wanted to eat, as someone floated the inevitable story of overimbibing. After all, no one wants to pull a Maureen Dowd. While we debated things and start cutting up pieces of the thick, rectangular slices, my friend’s dad called her. “Dad, they’ve got pizza with weed in it!” she exclaimed. He wasn’t a fan. “He says to go fuck yourselves, he doesn’t like eating it,” she told us. Well, you know, that’s okay, to each their own.

My friends all ate about a quarter of a slice each, and a couple more people had a half of a garlic knot to go along with the pizza. The reports from my friends were all pretty uniformly the same: Everyone got a kind of mellow head high that wasn’t too obtrusive. We all seemed able to follow Putney Swope, despite the dreamlike nature of the movie and the strange dialogue.

One More Slice for Me

Me, I’m prone to push things a little too far. I went back for more garlic knot pieces a couple times and also ate a big square of one of the cut up pepperoni slices, pushing myself to a little more than half a slice in total. A little bit of time passed and the next thing I knew I was very high, but in a kind of clear-eyed extremely chatty way.

It served me well for the next segment of the pizza experiment, which was taking it to a party that a friend’s sister was having.

At some point in my walk over I realized that while I felt good, I also felt so good I’d left the apartment carrying a box that said STONED and had a pot leaf on it, so I just gritted my teeth and hoped I didn’t run into a particularly gullible police offer (although the next day, the NYPD announced they would no longer arrest people for possession of THC oil, so maybe I would have been all right).

On To the Next Party

At the party, I brought the pizza into the packed kitchen, opened the box and announced to the room of complete strangers that they were welcome to eat the pizza but they should know that it was full of THC and I wasn’t joking about that.

I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, maybe someone to say thank you or get excited, but the first thing someone asked was “So wait are you, like, here at this party or are you selling this?”

Fair question, when a stranger in a Knicks jersey walks into your party. I at least made a new friend by the end of the night, presumably on the strength of my personality, though they did have a small piece of the pizza.

This Isn’t Your Main Meal

My main takeaway from the whole experience: Eat dinner before you actually eat Stoned Pizza. Since you most likely won’t be eating a whole slice, much less two as you would your standard pizza, it can be easy to forget to actually eat food for energy and making your brain work. (It’s also easy to get hungry, forget you’re eating infused food, and eat way more than you should.) The main reason I left the party was the combination of gnawing munchies and the realization that I was basically running on no dinner.

Word to the wise: Eat dinner before you actually eat Stoned Pizza.

One thing people kept asking me after I told them about the pizza was “Is this legal?”

The answer is: absolutely not. But that’s never really stopped New York City’s entrepreneurial class.

Some of the guys who sell nutcrackers (liquor/fruit punch concoctions that come in a sealed plastic bottle or pouch) have graduated from standing on the street with a cooler or walking past you on the beach yelling “Water! Corona! Nutcracker!” to Instagram accounts so you can just summon them to you. If you’re of a certain age you might also remember Phrosties, an Instagram-based service that delivered what were essentially frozen nutcrackers, a summer phenomenon that ended up with New York’s media class chattering on about the alleged hallucinogenic properties of the decidedly non-drugged frozen drinks.

All in all, I’d recommend Stoned Pizza. Even beyond the novelty of it, which, if adult use cannabis come to pass in New York this year, will wear off fast, there’s something more social about it than passing around a joint or a bowl. Certainly it’s a lot more fun than eating some infused gummy worms.

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