The Mushroom Movement Hits Atlanta in Full Force

At the Atlanta Mushroom Festival, chef Carla Fears prepares a meatless steak, demonstrating a dish she cooks at her busy pop-up Gourmet Street Foods. Plating each piece, she says, “cooking with mushrooms is easy. I could do them stuffed, sauteed, pickled, or in confit. But lion’s mane thrown in a pan with some sauce? This feeds everyone.”

The Mushroom Movement Hits Atlanta in Full Force

Atlanta chefs are putting the fun in fungi.

Servers pass samples around the room. Fears’s lion’s mane steak is juicy and tender and tastes like a high-end filet. Tomatoes, capers, and marjoram sauteed in the mushrooms’ moisture create a delicate dressing that coats every crevice of the fungus.

On the other side of town, in Decatur, the wild-game-loving, Michelin-recommended the Deer and the Dove uses mushrooms across their menu. “Our guests seem to love mushrooms, and are always excited to see what we might have coming down the seasonal pipeline” says chef and owner Terry Koval.

In Atlanta, a mushroom movement, part of a larger, national renaissance, has taken root. Local art fairs are filled with toadstool iconography on hats and vinyl stickers. The 2019 documentary Fantastic Fungi has a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes! The New York Times named mushrooms its 2022 “ingredient of the year.” Instacart’s 2024 consumer trend forecast indicates that in the past year home cooks have increased their lion’s mane mushroom purchases by 589 percent, by 293 percent for reishi, and by 42 percent for mushroom supplements. Much of this demand over the last decade has been driven by the Southeast. Between 2013 and 2023, per-pound sales of mushrooms in the Southeast increased by 26.8 percent.

Sustainability advocates have long championed mushrooms’ place at the dinner table to lessen our food’s environmental impact. And local businesses, particularly those catering to vegans and vegetarians, have only gotten more creative with how they treat the often-overlooked mushroom.

Since 2011 the West End’s Tassili’s Raw Reality Cafe has served five fast-casual staples with mushrooms at the center. Its website invites all diners ranging from “flexitarian to vegetarian, to vegan transitional clients, to raw experts” to indulge. Owner Tassili Ma’at’s Black Love Stew features a savory gravy of portobellos, and her Dat ISH spinach tortilla wrap stuffs in battered mushrooms between fresh avocado and tomatoes.

Mushrooms have long been a staple ingredient for many of the international dishes found on Buford Highway, whether vegetarian or meat-based. Northern China Eatery, for example, offers five dishes featuring mushrooms, from shiitake black mushroom bok choy to moo shu pork with the black mushrooms on the side.

Today, alongside its barbecue staples, Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q offers a pulled mushroom sandwich that’s already converted its clientele. It serves a large smoked portobello on a brioche bun covered in melted pimento, jalapeno mayonnaise, red onion, lettuce, and tomato.

“Mushrooms are meaty in taste and texture. They are sponges, which absorb the flavors of fire, smoke, seasoning, and sauce” says co-owner Jonathan Fox. The twin-brother team behind Fox Bros isn’t pushing for demand, they’re just meeting it. “People love it. Barbecue should be about more than smoking just meat. We invite our chef team to get creative with smoking items outside of proteins, especially with meat prices as high as they are. We prefer to embrace it than mock it.”

Sweetsong Kitchen & Bar, Duluth’s new Southern restaurant with a Korean influence, offers a plate of sweet soy-glazed roasted mushrooms. “We started cooking with [local mushrooms] during our testing phase and we were blown away by the quality” says Ashley Castille, Sweetsong’s director of food and beverage.

Many of Atlanta’s restaurants, including Sweetsong and the Deer and the Dove, source their mushrooms from nearby fungi-only growers like the Horti-Culture and Ellijay Mushrooms. The latter, a north Georgia-based, family-owned mushroom farm, grows species like lion’s mane and shiitake for restaurants across the wider Atlanta area. Although local fans flock to its Brookhaven location for small cardboard boxes of shiitake, the farm grows at scale for the city’s dining out scene.

“It feels like more and more chefs are adding better mushrooms to the menu as a meat replacement or enhancement” Ellijay Mushrooms co-founder Howard Berk says. The Ellijay team has a mushrooms au gratin recipe on the website, and its chef clients, including Miller Union, El Ponce, the Alden, and Bacchanalia, are experimenting with mushroom birria tacos and ravioli. “Our Atlanta chefs are really stepping up the mushroom game and taking them to the next level.”