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.”
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…
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