Chefs from high-end restaurants including Field & Vine, june bug, Giulia and Monteverdi come in to buy fresh mushrooms wholesale. Home cooks come shopping for a meat substitute, finding a fridge stocked year-round with favorites such as maitakes, chanterelles and morels.
With its locally and internationally sourced mushrooms – some foraged from the Pacific Northwest and West Coast, others, including truffles and black trumpets, brought from Europe – the quirky and eclectic Mushroom Shop has become Somerville’s trusted forager and fungi expert, the first and only specialty mushroom store in the state. (And styled as “THE mushroom shop.”)
Proprietor Tyler Akabane, 40, says his shop has thrived since opening in May 2022 because of the city’s openness to quirky local businesses.
“Somerville really gave us an opportunity that not a lot of other places would,” he said. “It’s something funky, something different, something unique and art-related. I think that’s very important.”
While wild mushrooms are main attraction of the Winter Hill store, the shelves are also lined with themed goods and tchotchkes – sauces, teas, cookbooks, art, clothing and more – serving an Internet-fueled hunger for collectibles and knickknacks for a primarily Gen Z audience. “There’s a lot of mushrooms in pop culture right now,” Akabane said.
There have been other food shops in the area focused as tightly: Follow the Honey opened in Harvard Square in 2011 but closed its storefront during the Covid pandemic, switching to online-only sales. A Grillo’s Pickles pop-up in Inman Square became a full-time bricks-and-mortar store there, lasting for two years before returning to a roving model.
From Akabane’s work as the shop’s procurer, he encounters examples daily of why mushrooms are no fad. In addition to a cultural shift away from meat, he sees customers such as the woman who came in recently with thanks for supplying a wild variety found in abundance in her native Poland – and not so much here. “She said she hasn’t been able to find a chanterelle in years,” Akabane said.
It was former Russians picking mushrooms in Swampscott, where Akabane grew up, who first exposed him the world of mycology. His own experience began when he was around 23 and fresh out of college: With a background in drumming, he worked as a music teacher at the Boston Higashi School. There, he discovered a plot of morels, a highly sought wild mushroom, growing on the school’s campus.
He remembered that one of his fine-dining recipes called for morels and harvested a supply. After that first taste of foraging (“somewhat akin to fishing, except it’s not in the water”), he was inspired to trade in his drumsticks.
“That was such a rewarding experience that I wanted to keep doing it over and over again,” Akabane said.
He liked being involved in a niche hobby whose intricacies are unknown to most people and felt a bit “mystical,” and wanted to keep learning. He apprenticed with Ben Maleson, a longtime mushroom hunter and provider to restaurant kitchens throughout the Boston area. They worked together as wholesalers for seven years until the Covid pandemic hit in March 2020 and restaurants closed. “We had all these mushrooms with nowhere to go,” Akabane said.
To adapt to the pandemic’s social distancing mandates, Akabane, now independent, started a mushroom home delivery service called Mushrooms for my Friends. It started as “a plea for help,” but he promoted the service on Instagram and was delighted to see demand grow.
“First we thought it was just going to [last] a week … then it was a month … and then it was a year and then a couple years. It just kept going and going,” Akabane said. “People kept passing the word along and there was enough interest. It made me feel confident to try and open up a store.”
While Massachusetts has a number of farms where locals can buy exotic mushrooms, the storefront “brought something to the food community that wasn’t here before,” Akabane said.
Customers come in for Akabane’s expertise as well as his stock, asking advice on how to begin foraging and tips on what mushrooms are best with what dishes, and how they should be prepared. He also hosts events to teach about foraging and types of local edible fungi. On a typical event, “we’ll go for a walk in the woods and then have a dinner afterward that reflects some of the stuff we saw,” he said. “When you meet other people who are into picking mushrooms, it’s really a thing to bond over.”
Akabane hopes that mushroom stores will one day feel as natural and commonplace in local neighborhoods as a cheese shop or meat shop. “We want to keep things vibrant and interesting,” he said.
THE mushroom shop, 433 Medford St., Winter Hill, Somerville
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