Customers come from far and wide for freshly foraged fungi at Massachusetts’ mecca of mushrooms. Tyler Akabane, the 41-year-old founder of The Mushroom Shop, has sold to people from Western Massachusetts, Rhode Island, even the West Coast.
They come for shiitake, maitake, lion’s mane, morel, porcini – mushrooms from all over the country end up here.
This year, the store makes a trip of its own, uprooting its mycelia from Winter Hill in Somerville, where it’s operated since May 2022, and replanting itself in East Cambridge.
The shop announced the move Friday, just days before the four-year anniversary of its opening. “We’re moving onto a new chapter,” said Akabane in an email newsletter and on social media.
Akabane said the shop will move at some point between July and October to 484 Cambridge St., where the Courthouse Fish Market operated for 112 years before closing in 2024.
His friend, Teddy Applebaum, who runs Elmendorf Baking Supplies with his wife, Alyssa, encouraged him to check out the area, which is home to family-run shops and other small businesses, including fishmongers, liquor stores and restaurants. “I feel like someone could do a whole bunch of shopping and stop at all of our spots and none of us would really be overlapping too much,” Akabane said.
The new spot boasts twice the square footage as the current shop at 433 Medford St., which Akabane said is a central reason for the move. “The place we’re in is only so big, and we’ve kind of filled up that space in a tight way,” he said. Its basement storage and walk-in fridge and freezer makes the new shop feel luxurious, Akabane said.
The store in Winter Hill has shelves stocked with items such as black beans, soy sauce and wild Atlantic kelp in addition to a glass counter full of ’shrooms. In East Cambridge, Akabane can add dairy, eggs and produce, though fungi remains the star. “Nothing will change about the mushrooms,” he said.
Akabane turned a passion for foraging into a career. He launched a home delivery service called Mushrooms For My Friends on March 16, 2020, three days into the Covid pandemic lockdown, and the brick-and-mortar shop two years later. Now, after four years, he’s glad to get a fresh start.
He’s looking forward to drawing a floor plan, decorating – visitors to the quirky corner shop in Winter Hill are greeted by hand-painted bees and snails on the window – and reinstalling the red landline phone behind the counter painted like a mushroom.
“The ability to do it again, make the business again, is really exciting,” he said.
He will also miss being in Somerville. “I really think of ourselves as a very Somerville-centered business, and we really love being in Somerville,” he said.
The shop has regulars who come weekly or biweekly that Akabane hopes to keep, but customers often have to travel out of their way to get to the current shop. “I think our location has made it hard for people to find us,” Akabane said.
The Cambridge Street location sits near the border between the two cities, a few blocks from Kendall Square and MBTA stations on the red and green lines, and the accumulation of businesses along a major traffic corridor bring foot and car traffic. The Winter Hill location is in a largely residential area around a 10-minute walk from Gilman Station on the green line.
Jessica Straus comes to The Mushroom Shop every other week for items she can’t get anywhere else. “The idea that they sell mushrooms is incredible to me,” she said. But she’s excited to spend more time in the new location, which is closer to her sculpting studio on the border between Cambridge and Somerville.
If customers can’t make it to the new shop, they can order mushrooms to their homes. Akabane relaunched home deliveries this spring. While he hasn’t seen as many orders as during the pandemic, he hopes that Somerville residents who are farther away will find it useful.
After the move from Somerville, Akabane said, “I very much hope, and I’m assuming to some degree – fingers crossed – that we’ll be able to become a part of the neighborhood in a similar way.”
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