Words and photos by Andrew Janjigian

Ever since Somerville’s The Mushroom Shop opened this past May, people have been phoning or dropping in to inquire about whether they sell “magic” mushrooms. The answer is no, they do not. But they do carry a wide array of edible mushrooms, both fresh and dried, along with a curated and varied assortment of other gourmet food products and mushroom-related merchandise.

The Mushroom Shop is the realization of an enduring dream for owner Tyler Akabane, and something that might not have come into being if not for the COVID pandemic. Prior to March 2020, Akabane had been the long-time right-hand man to Ben Maleson, mushroom forager and purveyor to the stars of Greater Boston’s restaurants. When lockdown forced restaurants to shutter, Maleson and Akabane found themselves with a lot of valuable fungal inventory to move and no customers to take it.

Akabane posted a note to his Instagram feed asking whether anyone wanted to buy mushrooms from him directly, and he received an enthusiastic response. Thus began Mushrooms for My Friends, a weekly home delivery service for edible mushrooms. Some of their products were foraged (or cultivated) locally, the remainder sourced from elsewhere in the U.S. and even Europe. When restaurants began to reopen, Maleson returned to direct sales and Akabane took over the online retail business entirely. Over time, he began adding new specialty food products to the roster: other foraged items like ramps, dried seaweed and fresh wasabi root, along with seasonal and unusual fruits, like pawpaws, Yuzu limes and cherimoyas.

As a customer of Mushrooms for My Friends myself, I was thrilled to find the weekly list of items for sale in my email inbox. Unlike at local supermarkets, where the selection of mushrooms was limited to—at best—maybe a half-dozen common, cultivated varieties, I now had access to mushrooms once reserved for posh chefs or those lucky and skilled enough to forage them in the wild. Things like white and black truffles, matsutakes, lion’s manes and hedgehogs, along with rare and hard-to-come-by fruits like kumquats and gooseberries.

The Mushroom Shop is Mushrooms for My Friends in physical form, and so much more, thanks to all the extra space. Housed in the bones of a former corner store between Magoun and Union Squares, it’s now Boston’s one-stop shop for all things (edible) mushrooms. Any given day the refrigerated deli case at the back of the shop might contain 10 different varieties of edible fungi, both wild and cultivated, and more during the peak mushroom-collecting seasons of late summer and autumn.

Nearby shelves hold bags of dried mushrooms and a wide assortment of other specialty pantry items: grains and beans, mushroom tinctures, oils, vinegars, prepared sauces, salts, spices and snack foods. An upright refrigerated case holds whichever fruits, herbs and vegetables are in season (when I last visited, it contained five varieties of local cherries and miyoga, a Japanese ginger relative), miso pastes, sauerkrauts and pickles, along with an assortment of small-batch sodas (it is a corner store, after all). There are shelves of mushroom-related books for sale or reading in-store, and scattered throughout the shop is a tastefully curated display of mushroom art, jewelry and tchotchkes.

On one recent visit to The Mushroom Shop, a customer stopped in for chanterelles for a summery corn-and-mushroom pizza dinner; another wanted a few perfect, jewel-like specimens to decorate a commissioned birthday cake. Akabane tells me that people continue to ask occasionally about what sort of “experience” to expect from consuming the mushrooms they sell. He tells them, “You’re gonna have a delicious meal!” Which should be more than enough magic for most.

433 Medford St., Somerville
617.718.0570
mushroomsformyfriends.com

This story appeared in the Fall 2022 issue.