Inside Philly’s First (and Only) Urban Mushroom Farm

The team at Mycopolitan / Photograph courtesy of Mycopolitan

Behind the Line is Foobooz’s interview series with the people who make up Philly’s dynamic bar and restaurant scene. For the complete archives, go here.

In the basement of a Northeast Philly warehouse, underneath Secret Circus, where aspiring performers practice aerial acrobatics, is Mycopolitan, a mushroom farm you’ve likely seen pop up on menus across the city. The chestnuts accompanying the Berkshire pork at Little Water, the meaty trumpets served alongside the cured duck carpaccio at Lacroix, and the mushrooms swimming in Kalaya’s tom yum soup all have roots — or, rather, a mycelium network — stemming back to this basement.

For decades, the specialty mushroom market has been dominated by Kennett Square, often referred to as the “Mushroom Capital of the World” for supplying half of the country’s crop. But since 2014, Mycopolitan co-founders Tyler Case, Brian Versek, Dan Howling, and Dave Novak have been growing high-quality lion’s mane, enoki, pioppino, black pearls, a wide variety of oysters, and more premium choice edibles right here in Philly. You can find them on the shelves at local grocery stores like Riverwards and Weaver’s Way, on tasting menus from Ambra to Provenance, and through their bi-weekly farm share.

According to Case, the journey building this unconventional urban mushroom farm was as much of a professional pursuit as a philosophical one. Here, he talks about the beauty of their symbiotic relationship with the rest of the world, how he switched careers from working at a methadone clinic to running an urban farm, and his deep reverence for fungi.

A variety of mushrooms from Mycopolitan / Photograph by Kae Lani Palmisano

I got into mushroom farming … because I love nature, I love growing stuff, and I was up for the challenge and for a change of pace in life. I’ve always been a nature kid and a science kid at heart, and I’ve always loved foraging.

As a kid … I would forage for plants around the mall, wherever they were growing in little tracts of woods around the burbs. But then in high school, I had a psychedelic trip that inspired me to get a field guide. I was working at the front desk at Sam Ash, and when it wasn’t very busy, I would just comb through the book and read up on magic mushrooms and choice edibles like chanterelles, black trumpets, and things like that.

At first, I didn’t even know … mushrooms were a totally different kingdom from plants. I thought there were just weird plants.

Before starting Mycopolitan, I worked … for a nonprofit doing behavioral research at a methadone clinic helping people overcome cocaine addiction, which is where I met my co-founder Brian Versek. We met people who had gone through the worst life you could imagine, and they came out clean. It was pretty inspiring to be around people who overcame so much, and the people we worked with were really cool. It could have been comfortable enough to stay at that job, but that career path would have required that I go back to school, and I didn’t want to go back to school.

After working at the methadone clinic … I knew I just wanted to grow something. So I did a lot of research on how to build a mushroom farm, but a lot of the information available online was from amateurs. So, it was like trying to figure out who seems the least full of B.S. But one thing I’ve learned is that farms do things differently. I purposely didn’t join a lot of message boards for commercial cultivators because I wanted to figure out how to grow mushrooms on my own. So now we do things differently for a lot of species than a lot of other people do, but it works for us.

Tyler Case holding a bag of king trumpet mushrooms / Photograph by Kae Lani Palmisano

I think just getting to know organisms … is really good for the soul. I’ve grown so much from having been forced to learn as much as I can about them. The more you’re around these organisms, the more you can actually listen to them, and now it’s like second nature, just coming in and making sure all the mushrooms are happy. Hopefully all of the years of intense head scratching and head banging have earned the right for us to say we’re pretty good mushroom farmers at this point and lucky enough to make a living from doing something that we genuinely love to do.

What I love most about mushrooms … is that they communicate underground through a mycelium network and help other plants, channeling minerals around, and whatnot. Plants and mushrooms have been partnering in symbiosis since the moment that plants emerged from the sea and came onto land. Both organisms and an entire ecosystem can benefit from this mutual relationship.

We built our farm in a basement because … we’re in a city, and most of our customers are in the city, so distribution is easier than if we were out in the country. And the basement makes sense. But also because basements provide natural temperature regulation. Traditionally, in France, they turned old limestone caves into mushroom farms. We’re not exactly a cave — it does get hot in the summer, and it can get kind of cool in the winter — but just being underground, and the walls of the building having contact with the subsoil, it does moderate temperatures to a certain degree, which is a little bit more energy-saving than if we were above ground.

Blue oyster mushrooms / Photograph by Kae Lani Palmisano

We’re cranking out … 1,100 to 1,200 pounds of mushrooms per week.

You can find Mycopolitan mushrooms … at around 20-ish restaurants around Philly. We also supply 10 smaller grocery stores like Riverwards Produce and co-ops like Weavers Way. We have a farm share where members get 2.3 pounds of a bunch of varieties of mushrooms every other week. And we do the Fairmount Farmers Market on Thursdays.

We grow around … 11 or 12 different varieties, and we grow them seasonally. So, you don’t see all of them year round. But usually, we have at least eight varieties available at any given time, which include lion’s mane, chestnut mushroom, pioppino, king trumpet, golden enoki, coral tooth, blue oyster, shiitake, and more.

Pioppino mushrooms / Photograph by Kae Lani Palmisano

My favorite mushroom … is shiitake. I never get tired of it. It has the most intense flavor. They’re smoky with a lot of umami. And when you dry them, the flavor intensifies. The texture’s not quite as good, but they’re still delicious.

Pioppino mushrooms are great too. They are a nutty-flavored mushroom. I think they have the best aroma of all the mushrooms that we grow. And you can cook them light and then preserve a lot of the aromatics, or you can, like, really brown them up and they get really cheesy. I think they have kind of a cheesy flavor.

Then there are king trumpet mushrooms. They are the king of the oyster mushrooms. They’re notable because they’re very dense and meaty. There’s a lot of mushroom tissue in there, and they’re very mild. You can cut them like scallops. They’re one of the ingredients in the mushroom pickle that we’re making now. We’re making pickles with king trumpets, chestnut mushrooms, and black pearl oysters. We find that mix makes for especially good pickles.

Tours of Mycopolitan are available for $95 per person. You’ll get an inside look at every step of the process from mixing and inoculating the substrate to harvest. You’ll also get to bring home a box of mushrooms from their farm share program. You can get your ticket and schedule your tour here.