Asheville Gets High On Mushroom Tourism

This article first appeared in The Food Section, which we have partnered with to look at the stories behind what we eat.

“So, the reason we came here is this log pile,” Alan Muskat says, pointing toward a roughly triangular stack of moss-fuzzed, weathered gray tree trunks. Crisscrossed by vines and encircled by brambles, the woodpile sits on the edge of a field just outside Asheville, North Carolina.

With a graying beard and off-white knit hat framing eyes creased with laugh lines, the longtime forager has a charming gnome-ish sensibility. He sets down his woven wicker basket, already half full of thin-needled pine sprigs, ruby red rose hips glimmering in the chilly November afternoon light, and a handful of the season’s last, wrinkly persimmons. 

He pulls out his homemade brife—a short knife with a small paintbrush taped to its handle for harvesting and cleaning mushrooms—and points to a chink between the logs. Peering down, I see the real reason he brought me to this unlikely place: a cluster of mushrooms with ruddy red, slightly cracked caps, which he identifies as Hypholoma sublateritium, known colloquially as brick caps. 

Brick caps are just one of over 2,000 different varieties of fungi to be found in the area, including choice edible varieties such as maitake, chicken of the woods, black trumpets, morels, and chanterelles, plus dozens more that Muskat notes are edible, but aren’t necessarily tasty.

This bounty is made possible by the region’s intense biodiversity. Nestled in the western edge of the state in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville is surrounded by the Pisgah National Forest, 500,000-acres of hardwood trees threaded with whitewater rivers and punctuated by peaks, perfect growing conditions for a stunning array of mushrooms. 

This makes Asheville a mushroom forager’s paradise, a tourism niche that’s becoming significant for the city of just over 90,000. The local Convention & Visitors Bureau’s website includes a section touting “Wild Food Foraging Adventures in Asheville,” calling it the “find dining” scene, while its press releases tout foraging opportunities, including trips into the woods to look for mushrooms and other edibles with Luke Gilbert and Natalie Dechiara of Wild Goods. Rather than forfeiting mushrooms to the grassroots, Asheville is elevating and showcasing them in myriad ways—from restaurants and farmers markets to wellness spaces and the arts scene.

Twelve thousand years after the Blue Ridge Mountains’ first known human residents went looking for dinner, foraging is now a bona fide national trend. On TikTok, videos with #foraging have accumulated more than 1.7 billion views, while high-profile accounts on Instagram, such as @blackforager, @foragerchef, and @appalachian_forager, have acquired millions of followers. Morel foraging was even the focus of a Lexus commercial.

Leaning down, Musk starts harvesting the brick cap mushrooms, tossing them into the basket. Tonight, I’m dining at The Market Place in downtown Asheville, which has been serving wild mushrooms since the early ‘90s, where I’ll eat everything we foraged, concluding the two-part tour organized by Muskat’s wild food educational organization, No Taste Like Home. 

No Taste Like Home has been offering foraging tours since 1995 and partnering with restaurants for “forest to table” dinners since 2012; over 8,000 people have participated. Though there are other “forage-and-feast” experiences around the country, few are as extensive or fully integrated into the local restaurant scene. 

At the end of forays, finds are identified, placed in a labeled bag, and dropped at one of seven restaurants where the ingredients become a part of that evening’s dinner. Wild mushrooms might get sautéed with shallots and lemon zest before being served atop buttered toast at The Bull & Beggar, while chickweed and stinging nettles could become a pesto for a creamy pasta at Tastee Diner.

William Dissen, executive chef and owner of The Market Place, loves serving guests wild mushrooms because “they’re flavors that you can’t get in the grocery store,” or at least not in the big-name supermarkets where home cooks tend to do most of their shopping.

Dissen describes Muskat’s approach as “brilliant,” likening the program to “Disney World for adults.”

Aside from the No Place Like Home dinners, Dissen estimates he annually buys a few thousand pounds of wild mushrooms from several foragers (In North Carolina, restaurants can only buy wild mushrooms from a state-certified “mushroom identification expert”), plus an additional 3,000 pounds of cultivated mushrooms.

A major source of the latter is Black Trumpet Farm in nearby Leicester, an operation co-owned by husband-and-wife team Jay and Gwen Englebach. Selling to roughly 30 restaurants and shoppers at local farmers’ markets, Black Trumpet grows up to 1,000 pounds a week of around 10 varieties, including oyster, shiitake, black pearl, lion’s mane, chestnuts, enoki, pioppino, and maitake.

“These are not the rubbery canned button mushrooms people grew up eating,” says Jay Englebach. “These are something else.”

Many in the region aren’t just attracted to the culinary potential of mushrooms. In an area that’s long been infatuated with alternative medicine, their purported health benefits are highly appealing. 

Fungi are a part of the fast-growing trend of nutraceuticals, substances credited with providing physiological benefits or protection against chronic ailments. Loaded with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, various mushrooms can lower blood pressure, boost the immune system, help with weight loss, promote gut health, and prevent cancer. According to a report from Reportlinker.com, the functional mushroom market was $29.89 billion last year and is expected to grow to $44.81 billion by 2028.

Nowhere is this trend more apparent than at the Pot Stirred, a first-of-its-kind mushroom café tucked away in the Canopy Studios & Gallery in the Asheville’s River Arts District. With a light wood counter and well-worn brick walls, the slender space is decorated with funky mushroom art, Pride flags, and plenty of plant life.

While there, you can enjoy a vanilla mushroom latte or a turmeric-boosted Hold Your Gold, both featuring lion’s mane and cordyceps mushrooms; the former may be a mood elevator and help dispel anxiety, the latter might boost exercise performance and have anti-aging properties. Mushrooms are infused into simple syrups—between that sweetness and the flavor of the coffee, it’s hard to detect there’s fungi in your latte.

“We wanted to find a way to normalize plant medicine in a new way, and people love their coffee,” says owner Taylon Breanne, who sources all her mushrooms locally from foragers and cultivators. “We want people to drink it and say, ‘These medicinal mushrooms made me feel really good. I might go try them outside of coffee.’”

Breanne pins the interest in mushroom medicine to the fallout from the pandemic, which rocked large swathes of the population with anxiety and depression. Still, lots of customers come in looking to feel good in a more recreational way. “The first question a lot of people ask is, ‘Is this psychedelic?’” says Breanne. “People are really into microdosing, so a lot of them are coming to the café because they think I might have them.”

That’s no surprise to Heather Brooks, an Asheville artist who forages mushrooms, arranges them into intensely eye-catching designs, and photographs her pieces under the moniker Small Woodland Things, which gained international acclaim after several works went viral.

“Asheville has a long hippie heritage and mushrooms have always been a friend of the hippie,” she says. 

An avid outdoorswoman, Brooks hopes her shroomy works inspire viewers to embrace nature more. “I would just love it if people just went out for a walk afterwards and said, ‘Let me look around. Let me peek under a log to see what I can find.’” 

After Muskat and I finish peeking under the rest of the logs, harvesting a couple dozen mushrooms, our foray is finished.

That evening, I amble over to The Market Place, where my meal begins with wild tea made with the pine sprigs and rose hips I helped pick, the soothingly warm liquid slightly tangy and resinous in a pleasant way. The brick cap mushrooms arrive as part of an appetizer starring pan-seared Brussels sprouts and bacon cubes, with just a hint of our foraged persimmons in the sauce.

Earthy, nutty, rich with umami and just a touch sweet, the dish tastes like late fall in Asheville. 

As I savor it, I consider how mushroom foraging is often done alone in remote places, but this city is turning that paradigm upside down. Here, mushrooms are weaving the people together—residents and visitors, in the forest and around tables, like many strands of mycelium, fungi’s delicate thread-like root systems. Though there is still much to learn about these almost otherworldly organisms and what they can do, Asheville has shown that mushrooms have the capacity to foster community. 

Nevin Martell is a D.C.-area based food and travel writer, parenting essayist, recipe developer, and photographer who has been published by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, USA Today, National Geographic, Fortune, and many other publications.