There's one item at Rosenberg's Bagels and Delicatessen in Denver that, despite not being on the menu, gets mentioned by customers two to three times per day.

"I don't remember who came up with it first, but everyone was immediately on board," said Nicholas "Nicky the Fish" Bruno, the 31-year-old general manager. "We knew it was going to work, we just didn't know how good—or how strong—it was going to be."

You won't see Rosenberg's THC smoked salmon on its website, or amid the pre-packed Halvah Marble bars and black and white cookies near the checkout counter. But the experimental item has already established itself as part of Denver's burgeoning legal-weed lore. Its potency has knocked the socks off seasoned stoners. Its novelty and potential illegality attracted a visit from the state health department. And it's already proven so promising that Rosenberg's is looking to it as a future path for their business.

Rosenberg's Bagels and Delicatessen

Since arriving on Denver's fast-growing food scene last summer, Rosenberg's owner Joshua Pollack, a 31-year-old New Jersey native and University of Colorado graduate, has been on a frantic mission to provide an authentic Jewish deli experience in the Rocky Mountains. He draws inspiration from the classic New York delis of his childhood and, in January, was blessed with a thumbs-up from a The New York Times travel guide.

That's how restaurants should be. In a boomtown like Denver—young, educated, and trailing only San Francisco in rent inflation—competition for customers is stiff. Whimsical, oddly practical ideas, such as the open-flame "fish mobile" Pollack and Bruno assembled at last weekend's star-studded Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, get noticed. In the same spirit, Rosenberg's crafted an appropriately heady giveaway for the first state to ever legalize recreational marijuana.

"4/20 has become quite the holiday here," Pollack said from the back of Rosenberg's on a recent, typically bustling morning, flanked by the hirsute, portly Bruno. "They closed down the block we're on for this huge party with Cypress Hill, Method Man, and Redman, so we vended stoner items like pizza bagels, lots of pastries, and bagel dogs, which are basically huge pigs-in-a-blanket."

Also available for sampling: their weed-focused take on classic smoked salmon.

"We talked a lot about tinctures and different types of alcohol and the best ways to infuse the fish," Bruno said. "But we really just wanted to unite our love of food and cannabis."

As a seasoned fine-dining chef who has cooked on every continent except Antarctica, Bruno already had a strong sense of where he wanted to go. He started by mixing two ounces of trim (the still-potent leftovers of the ganja harvesting process) from the OG Ghost strain with Everclear to extract the psychoactive THC element. He stored it for about a week then strained out the marijuana and cooked the liquid down to an oily, inky-green concentrate. He poured that over a $100, four-pound side of fresh Scottish salmon, wrapped it in plastic, and cured it for 72 hours. He accented the "Medicated Gravlax," as it was called, with dill and lemon and smoked it in Rosenberg's Southern Pride-brand smoker. Bruno loaded the housing that normally accepts flavorful wood chips with an additional jar of cannabis trim and cold-smoked the fish between 60 and 80 degrees for an hour and a half.

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The potency? No one had a clue. Pollack carefully sliced thin, half-ounce pieces for the staff to sample as Bruno hailed Rosenberg's as the world's first eatery to officially undertake the experiment.

"You got a little of that herbaceous flavor from the cannabis, but also really clean, fresh flavors from the dill and lemon," Bruno said. "Still, the high was a little too strong for us to truly enjoy it."

Lacking any state-mandated potency testing from an independent lab (which is required for all retail edibles in Colorado), Pollack estimates that each half-ounce slice contained at least 10 milligrams of THC, the current maximum amount for a single-serving edible, and easily enough for most consumers to feel a buzz. Rosenberg's also sent five pounds of the THC smoked salmon to High Times Magazine's nearby Cannabis Cup festivities on April 20, which "went really, really fast."

"Usually the people who enter their edibles (competition) do it with chocolate and candies, which really just obscures the flavor of the cannabis," Bruno said. "Next year when we're getting interviewed, it'll be about our first-place Cannabis Cup win for smoked salmon."

The buzz didn't end there. On May 19, The Smoker's Club website posted a YouTube video of the step-by-step preparation for Rosenberg's THC smoked salmon. Despite a disclaimer that it was made for personal consumption and in accordance with Colorado's Amendment 64 (which legalized recreational marijuana on Jan. 1, 2014), Denver ABC affiliate Channel 7 seized on the video and reported Rosenberg's to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

The resulting cease-and-desist order specified that Rosenberg's stop using marijuana in its commercial kitchen, a regulatory slap on the wrist that still prompted Pollack to assure customers of his kitchen cleaning techniques and lack of contamination.

"The only question the (health inspector) really had was, 'Did it work?'" Bruno remembered.

"They tried to make a story where there wasn't one," Pollack added. "Our culture, even here in Colorado, is probably still years away from the negative stigma fading out, but people in the food scene are really pushing the envelope."

And customers haven't stopped asking about it—so much so that Pollack is in talks with his buddies in the medical marijuana industry to use their licensed, medically-infused-products kitchens in creating a co-branded line of Jewish deli-weed items.

"Pretty much every chef I talk to wants to get in on this," said Pollack, who started smoking marijuana when he was 15 and scored it illegally to help his mother with the fallout from her lung cancer treatment. "This is a huge potential market, especially in Jewish culture. I'm Jewish, and (Bruno) runs with the tribe, so we're taking a trip to New York in August to go to places like Russ & Daughters and learn even more."

Pollack is also hoping to start taking custom orders for his THC salmon—for both potency and flavor—from hungry customers while he explores additional deli-weed recipes. He's in good company, given the marijuana and food-scene overlap, and the fact that his brother, lawyer Jordan Wellington, helped draft major portions of Amendment 64 and now works for Denver law firm Vicente Sederberg, which is renowned for its marijuana reform efforts.

"In the future, I won't have to do a dab," Pollack said. "I can just eat a bagel and lox."

If someone's going to turn marijuana-infused deli food into a retail hit, Denver is arguably the best place to do it—and Rosenberg's is poised to get there first.

John Wenzel John Wenzel is a reporter and critic-at-large for The Denver Post whose work has appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic.

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