The Mushroom Shop, the beloved local proprietor of wild and cultivated culinary mushrooms, has officially opened the doors of its new location on Cambridge Street.
Customers of the former Winter Hill location will be greeted by the same mushroom fridge, whimsical vibe and cheeky signs, but will have over double the room to peruse an expanded selection that includes produce, tea, condiments and books.
The new location in East Cambridge is near other specialty grocers: New Deal Fish Market, which has sold fresh fish in the neighborhood for nearly a century, and Elmendorf Baking Supplies & Cafe, which among other things mills its own flour.
Mushroom Shop customer Flora Spivak, founder of the Somerville Fermentation Festival, said she’s “excited” about the new location. Spivak lives in Belmont and on Thursday, she stopped at Elmendorf on her way to The Mushroom Shop’s new location for oyster and cauliflower mushrooms, and paw paws, a fruit with custard-like innards native to North America.
“I regularly go from one store to the other, and it wasn’t very convenient before and now it is,” she said.
She appreciates The Mushroom Shop as “an incredible resource for not just mushrooms but all sorts of funky things.”
“I never know what I’m going to find there,” she said.
From disgust to delight
The Mushroom Shop’s owner, Tyler Akabane, is quick to admit he did not grow up loving mushrooms. “Up until I was 18, it was just Hot Pockets,” he half-jokes.
Akabane, who grew up in Swampscott, said mushrooms in the United States are often thought of as either poisonous or psychedelic. But after expanding his palate in college, Akabane began probing the cookbooks of high-end restaurants to understand why people shelled out hundreds of dollars for a meal. Many of the ingredients listed were hard to source, including specific mushrooms.
Not long after college, he spotted morels growing in mulch outside the special education school in Randolph where he worked and harvested them. This first taste opened a portal to the world of wild mushrooms. Soon after, Akabane began foraging, which he likens to treasure hunting. At the time, “it felt like a mystical process,” he said. “Like wizard skills.”
He met the experienced forager Ben Maleson in the woods outside of Boston and they started selling mushrooms to high-end restaurants. Then came the 2020 pandemic, when lockdowns killed their orders. So Akabane launched a mushroom home delivery service to his Boston-area foodie friends via an Instagram account.
“It was really unusual and weird,” he said. “We were just dropping off a brown bag on your doorstep and texting you. It was so sketchy, adjacent to a drug deal.”
But the weirdness was part of the service’s charm.
“Part of it was the novelty,” said Akabane. “This very unusual interaction was great fun for people as well.”
The delivery business was popular enough that Akabane crowdfunded a 665-square-foot brick-and-mortar business, which opened in 2022 in Winter Hill. He still sold to restaurants like Field and Vine and Giulia, and led mushroom foraging classes as well.
Four years in, the business was outgrowing its space. So as he neared the end of its lease, Akabane began searching for a new location.
A mushroom moment
As Akabane settled into his new shop in East Cambridge this week, he and his staff also prepared to host the second annual Mushroom Fest at Bow Market on Saturday, Oct. 17, along with the restaurant Saus. Inspired by the Telluride Mushroom Festival, there will be food vendors and food items for sale, as well as a mushroom beer on tap at Remnant Brewing. Offerings include a fermentation presentation, a wild mushroom education table, as well as a station for learning about growing your own mushrooms at home.
Even after four years, Akabane isn’t entirely convinced that he isn’t still benefiting from a pandemic bump in business. During COVID lockdowns, commercial rents were low, and home cooking projects and foraging piqued the public’s interest in culinary mushrooms.
“That opportunity isn’t gonna happen again,” Akabane said. “No one’s gonna be really excited about a mushroom delivery again like they were during the pandemic.”
But the niche element is still working in his favor. Akabane suspects there are fewer than a dozen mushroom shops in North America.
But this new location reads less like a novelty shop and more like a small grocer. While his shop currently stocks around 18 types of cultivated and wild mushrooms, there is also a table of local and specialty produce (think bergamot and yuzu) as well as walls of unique teas, heirloom beans, tinctures, tinned fish, and more.
At the same time, “a lot of these [products we sell] are intriguing or evocative.” he said. “I think the best thing that we put on our sign is ‘wonder.’ I don’t think I can sell wonder, but that’s the thing that is keeping me engaged and probably keeps a lot of other people engaged.”
Stop and shop
Credit: Ruth Tam
The grocers in East Cambridge are an emerging exception to the way food has been sold at supermarkets for generations. Instead of a one-stop shop with aisles of mass-produced produce and products from third-party vendors, The Mushroom Shop, New Deal, and Elmendorf specialize in a specific food, and offer other ingredients and tools to cook with it.
“We’re trying to be a neighborhood food business,” said Akabane. “It’s just enough of what you need at home that maybe you don’t have to go to the supermarket or something.”
The Mushroom Shop can’t compete with Market Basket on prices, but its customers are defining value in a different way.
“I actually really don’t like going to grocery stores because it’s kind of like the lowest common denominator in a way,” said fermentation enthusiast Spivak. “Yes, you can get a lot of different things, but there’s not necessarily hand-picked curation. [Food] is an art, this is a craft.”
The three specialty grocers on Cambridge Street are within 500 feet of each other. Is that close enough for a shopper who is used to finding all their groceries under the same roof?
“It’s a good excuse to get your steps in and visit a couple nice places that you feel good about visiting,” said Akabane. “At this moment in time, a lot of people have to make this decision of, ‘Do you want to go into this more robotic future, where things are less personal, or do you want to take a step back and slow down and try to live a little more purposefully?’”
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.