Arrowhead Manor's Cannabis Acceptance Offers Rare Hotel Experience

Hotel food is often hit or miss, but Arrowhead Manor offers a meal package guaranteed to send guests off on a high note.

A boutique hotel in Morrison located on a cliff between Doublehead Mountain and Highway 285, Arrowhead Manor offers scenic views and a peaceful bed-and-breakfast experience just thirty minutes outside of Denver. However, owners James and Marguerite Herb (that's their real last name, we swear) wanted something special to attract guests.

"A lot of people have been staying here for years, because they knew we were 4/20-friendly. They wanted to smoke some pot and see a Red Rocks concert, and that's great. But a lot of them wanted something more," James Herb recalls.

The Herbs built the Arrowhead in 2004, and have allowed guests 21 and up to smoke marijuana on outdoor portions of the property since the state legalized recreational pot in 2012. Even so, visitors kept asking the Herbs about pairing cannabis use with meals. Unwilling to allow smoke inside the hotel, the Herbs began looking into infused meals last year. They soon found Jarod "Roilty" Farina, a private chef with a very public profile for his cannabis cooking.

Farina has appeared in cooking shows on Bravo, Discovery Plus and the Food Network for both cannabis and non-cannabis cooking. He runs a private catering service that specializes in multi-course meals infused with cannabis, dropping infused olive oil on his dishes to get customers high as they eat. Now Farina has a residency at the Arrowhead, where he cooks up customized brunches and dinners with various dosages of THC.
"As far we know, we are the only hotel in the country offering this," James boasts. "Everybody loves it. It's kind of unique, and it's only for certain people, because it's pretty expensive."

And rare. While we can't confirm the Arrowhead is the only hotel in the country offering a cannabis-infused dining option, it's the only place in Colorado regularly offering such a service. That's how the Herbs and Farina are able to charge $200 for a three-course meal, with prices going up with each extra course.

Despite being the first state to legalize recreational marijuana, the pot hospitality sector is still severely lacking in Colorado. Only one hotel, the Patterson Inn, currently has a marijuana hospitality license, but the Denver hotel still doesn't have an opening date for its indoor marijuana lounge — and the vast majority of towns and counties in Colorado ban public pot hospitality altogether. As a private lodging establishment, the Arrowhead can allow guests to consume edibles and smoke marijuana outside, but it still can't sell anyone marijuana.

To get around that rule, participants in the cannabis dinner buy a gram of marijuana concentrate from a dispensary and give it to Farina, who infuses the hash into olive oil and then drops it on each dish to a diner's preference. About halfway through a five-course dinner, guests start to giggle more and their eyes get glossy, notes Farina, who cooks cannabis dinners for everyone from locals to NFL players in town to play the Broncos.
"Most of the people booking us for brunches are out-of-towners. We do get a lot of tourists, but the past couple of months we're getting much more local support," Farina says. "We get a lot of re-bookings from people who come back to visit, and from locals, too."

Farina and his team whip up lamb chops, mushroom risotto, Kansas City-style ribs, roasted artichokes, chocolate soufflé and much, much more for Arrowhead guests, who would barely make it up the stairs after these feasts even if weed weren't involved. He's particularly proud of the risotto, which "won" over his wife, and likes to tell stories about each dish. The whole roasted artichokes, a rare way to cook the thistle, is a re-creation of snacks from his childhood, he notes, and the mashed potatoes are an homage to a restaurant where he once worked.

Farina would like to host marijuana cooking classes and demonstrations, too, if demand calls for it.

The Herbs prominently display the cannabis dinner offering on the Arrowhead website, and stand ready to further lean into the hotel's marijuana-friendly reputation, according to James, who estimates that "around 70 percent of people staying here smoke pot." The Arrowhead also books weddings and private events, and are cool regarding marijuana use — as long as party guests are staying there or have a ride home.

"We're about to be stepping into this kind of stuff more, and we'd like to book as many dinners as possible," James says. "We've even started ordering cannabis-themed decorations."