SUB SHOP CELEBRATES - BUT DOESN'T SERVE - MARIJUANA

Louisville Owners Say Nothing Illegal Sold There

LOUISVILLE - Two-foot-long papier-mache joints rest above one of the
restaurant's doors and TV set. The menu offers Thai Stick, White Widow
and Northern Lights -- sandwiches and salads, not strains of marijuana.

Next to the cash register sits a 4-inch figurine of a man smoking a
joint and a basket filled with "hemp brownies" and Rice Krispies bars.

Pictures of men in Afros getting high decorate the walls. There's a
marijuana leaf clock and a poster of a 1950s-style salesman with
"marijuana" printed at the top and "Proud sponsors of ... um ... we
forget!" on the bottom.

No, it's not a college student's dream cafeteria. All of these images
contribute to the ambience at the new Cheba Hut "Toasted" Subs shop.

If there is a dream, it belongs to co-owner Josh Lee, a 23-year-old
student who until recently attended concerts where hemp brownies and
Rice Krispies bars were shared, and who understands the connection
between food and marijuana.

"There just seems to be a huge correlation (between) stoners and
munchies," said Lee.

It's a correlation that led Lee, who's given to zip-up hooded
sweatshirts and backward baseball caps, to dream of starting his own
little cafe with a marijuana theme.

But Lee says his original vision wasn't as blatant as the Cheba Hut,
the sub shop he and his mother, Kim Lee, opened last month. On the
restaurant's menu are the Shwag, the KGB and the Acapulco Gold
sandwiches -- along with a statement explaining that "All names
'refer' to subs only." Three walls of the shop are covered with a
mural that features a turtle smoking marijuana -- painted by his mother.

It was Kim, a 46-year-old freelance artist, who came up with the idea
of opening a Cheba Hut in Louisville. Despite appearances, the sub
shop promises to sell nothing illicit. The food contains nothing
psychoactive, and the hemp brownies are just brownies topped with
commercial hemp seed shells.

Cheba Hut is a chain. There are three in Arizona, one in Colorado and
now one in Louis-ville.

Kim Lee discovered Cheba Hut while on vacation in Arizona last March.
The toasted sandwiches were so good, she says, that she called her
son, a culinary student at Sullivan University, to tell him. He asked
his mother to bring back a menu, and the two were soon conspiring to
open a Cheba Hut here.

When the duo shared their plans with friends and family, they were met
with encouragement -- and laughter.

"It's kind of hard to explain to your friends that you are going to
take a sandwich shop related to marijuana and put it in Kentucky,"
Josh Lee said.

Cheba Hut founder Scott Jennings came up with the theme for his
restaurant from the Cheech and Chong movie Nice Dreams (1981), in
which ice cream is named after different strains of marijuana, and
from menus that his friends brought back from Amsterdam hash houses.

When the Louisville shop opened recently, it became the first Cheba
Hut not managed by Jennings or one of his former employees. Jennings
said he is ready for expansion.

"We don't want 2,000," he said from his home in Fort Collins. "But a
couple hundred throughout the country would be all right. If it is a
cool fit."

Kim and Josh Lee seem to be a "cool fit."

"They're kind of laid-back to begin with, but still very
professional," said Jennings. "It would be very hard if it was just
Josh or just Kim.

"But together it works."