[Measurements For Cooking Crack Cocaine
Sharif Garmon
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Six healthy male volunteers were exposed to the vapor of 100 and 200 mg freebase cocaine heated to a temperature of 200 degrees C in an unventilated room (12,600-L volume) for a period of 1 h. No pharmacological effects were detected as a result of the exposure. Blood specimens collected immediately following exposure were negative for cocaine and metabolites. Urine specimens analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry contained peak concentrations of benzoylecgonine that ranged from 22 to 123 ng/mL. The peak excretion time for benzoylecgonine following passive exposure was approximately 5 h. The amount of cocaine inhaled by the subjects during passive exposure was estimated from room air measurements of cocaine to be approximately 0.25 mg. The total amount of cocaine (cocaine plus metabolites) excreted in urine by the six subjects ranged from 0.04 to 0.21 mg. For comparison, the six subjects also received an intravenous injection of 1 mg cocaine hydrochloride. Four of six subjects screened positive (300-ng/mL cutoff concentration) following the injection, indicating that the minimum amount of cocaine in these subjects necessary to produce positive results was approximately 1 mg. A second passive inhalation study was undertaken in which specimens were collected from research staff who assisted in a series of experimental studies with "crack" (freebase cocaine) smokers. The research staff remained in close vicinity while the crack smokers smoked three doses of freebase cocaine (12.5, 25, and 50 mg) over a period of 4 h. As a result, staff members were passively exposed to sidestream smoke from crack pipes and to breath exhalation from the crack smokers. Urine specimens from the staff members contained a maximum of 6 ng/mL benzoylecgonine. Only traces (less than 1 ng/mL) of cocaine were detected in any specimen. Overall, these studies demonstrated that individuals exposed to cocaine smoke under naturalistic or artificial conditions absorbed small amounts of cocaine that were insufficient to produce positive urine specimens at standard Department of Health and Human Services cutoffs. However, passive exposure conditions that would result in absorption of cocaine in amounts exceeding 1 mg could result in the production of cocaine-positive urine specimens.
I'm sitting at a table at EL Ideas, Foss's restaurant in a warehouse-filled corner of Chicago's near south side. Against a backdrop of an empty basketball court, a juvenile detention center, a shuttered animal shelter in a condemned building, a freight train yard, a bar that serves strong drinks to strong train yard workers, and a gas station convenience store whose clerk sits behind bulletproof glass, a tasting-menu-only restaurant with a Michelin star stands out. But this isn't your ordinary tasting-menu-only restaurant. For starters, there's the cocaine course.
I pick up the tiny straw that accompanies the dish and use it to orally inhale the powder, which turns out to be a mixture of dehydrated coconut and lime. The taste is clean and clear. It evokes a high-end riff on Pixy Stix, the powdered sugar candy that my rough-and-tumble friends and I would eat (and occasionally snort) before high school track meets in the mid '90s.
"That's how you know they're experts," Moorman jokes, explaining that the practice grinds out any lumps in more potent versions of the powder. The cocaine course reveals a lot about people. "We actually just had an incident," Moorman says. "A guy came here who had been to rehab not too long ago. When the cocaine course came out, he briefly left the restaurant to call his sponsor."
At EL Ideas, sometimes one must also take an expansive view of utensils. Sure, there's a fancy scallop course with arugula puree, and a lamb course with olive sauce, both consumed traditionally, with knives and forks. But then there's that inhaled coconut-lime powder. On some occasions, there's a "Twix Bar": a chicken liver-topped crouton dipped in chocolate that's eaten with the hands. On other nights, there's a raw milk course served in a baby bottle. "Foss was going through this infantile stage," Moorman recalls. "I've never seen so many uncomfortable men! Foss told everyone to pinch the nipple, shake it, and suck."
On the night I'm there, patrons aren't asked to suck anything, but they are asked to lift a small, clear glass bowl to their faces and lick a caviar-topped, solid-state White Russian off of it. Why a glass dish? "So you can see person licking in front of you," Foss says. "And who doesn't enjoy that?" Indeed, a roomful of diners ingesting the dish is so collectively suggestive that the performance wouldn't be out of place on Cinemax After Dark. Is it the best way to appreciate good caviar? Not necessarily. But it loosens you up for the cocaine to come.
It's not quite what you'd expect from a forty-five-year-old Milwaukee native who speaks with a proper Midwest accent and a mouthful of curses. Foss is five-foot ten. He's dirty blond. During service he wears a blue button-down whose design has more in common with an auto mechanic's uniform than it does with traditional chefs' whites. His cooking has been exuberantly praised by the Chicago Tribune, but you won't find his spot on a national or global best-restaurants list, nor will you read much about it in national publications run by out-of-town food writers or gastronauts. For all its brilliance, EL Ideas is still very much under the radar, still very much undersold.
This may be because Foss is very good at underselling. "I'm not going to kid myself; this will never be a three Michelin-star restaurant, ever," he tells me before dinner service. Guests are starting to fill up the room; it's warmly lit with lots of exposed brick, roughly divided into dining room and kitchen by a waist-high wall. "We're so far outside the box. We play loud hip-hop. We do not give a fuck."
Except he very much does give a fuck. He lives with Moorman in the apartment above the restaurant (the two have been a couple since 2012). He produces intelligent, whimsically modernist food that's studied enough to earn EL Ideas one Michelin star, if not yet three. He talks about the expansion of his empire with more circumspection than some policy analysts lend to prognostications of nuclear war. He admits to being very stressed about my presence in the dining room. He hasn't left the country since EL Ideas opened, has barely left the city. Chicago is one of world's most important food cities, and he's one of Chicago's most important chefs.
ore than any other city, Chicago is the heart of America's experimental dining movement. A progressive, inventive philosophy underscores many of its best restaurants, one that isn't found with the same intensity or focus elsewhere.
In Chicago, all bets are off. Think: helium-filled taffy balloons at Alinea, edible menus at Moto, ice-encased old-fashioneds that you crack open with a slingshot at Aviary, psychedelic king crab terrariums at Grace, spruce juice-filled test tubes at Elizabeth, and at EL Ideas, spearmint ice cream that's nitro-frozen to such an intensely frozen hardness that it mimics the texture of a candy cane. "I do think Chicago is the food capital of America," says Moorman. "It has the most interesting food. The most soulful food. The most thoughtful food."
Indeed. Foss doesn't rely on a single dime of outside capital at EL Ideas. Thanks to the restaurant's out-of-the-way location, he can afford to be the business's sole owner. He doesn't carry any real debt on the restaurant's equipment; paying off all of any major purchases within the month, from the immersion circulators to the high-tech Pacojet that makes sorbets so clean and stable you can go out for a mid-course smoke and your dessert still won't have melted by the time you come back inside.
All of this enables Foss to take risks he couldn't elsewhere. But the other advantage of being experimental in Chicago is that the city is used to it. "You have a dinership that is forgiving and incredibly adventurous," Moorman says. The proof is on the books: Nearly four years after opening, tables at EL Ideas are still mostly all booked up two months out.
Foss seems surprised by his own success: "It was never meant to be sustainable on its own," he says of the restaurant. "I was always just expecting this place to be a stipend, financially, to the food truck." He ran that food truck, a mobile protein purveyor called MeatyBalls, from 2010 to 2011, regularly attracting lines two dozen deep. But his career didn't necessarily point to a career selling Saturday Night Live-inspired lamb-and-pork "Schweddy balls" out of a service window on wheels.
After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1991, Foss accrued a serious lineup of fine dining merit badges on his resume, including stints at New York's Quilted Giraffe and Oceana in the early 1990s, a five-year tenure at Le Cirque that same decade, as well as some time at seminal Chicago-modernist restaurant Tru in 2000. But then things get muddy: Foss, rather than staging at Ivy League restaurants like Noma or Mugaritz, spent many of his pre-EL Ideas years at hotel restaurants that weren't exactly known as incubators of promising gastronomic talent. He put in two years at the Four Seasons in Maui. He logged ten months at The King David in Jerusalem (Foss, a non-observant Jew, speaks Hebrew). He bounced around Brazil ("best time of my life") and Bermuda (where he unhappily cooked old-school French fare).
"I thought my dreams of being a respectable chef who would ever have a nice restaurant were drifting," he says of that period. He came back to Chicago in 2008 to run the show at Lockwood, the fine-dining restaurant inside the Palmer House Hilton, where he pulled in critical raves but was fired two years later after making a lighthearted pot joke on Twitter. Now, he makes cocaine jokes on your plate.
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