Magic Mushrooms

Foraging is alive and well. Just ask Tyler Gray, who turned a childhood passion in a thriving business

By Murray Bancroft

TYLER GRAY’S STORY is full of international intrigue, late-night shipments and unmarked delivery vans. He’s not a spy or a drug dealer, though some of the world’s top chefs would call his fare—rare and exotic ingredients—the hard stuff.

“It all started as a pastime with my mother, foraging for mushrooms and berries on the Sunshine Coast,” says Gray, 29, of his mushroom supply business. In 2000, after a nine-month haul following the various mushroom seasons from the Yukon to California, Gray joined forces with some exporting partners and Mikuni Wild Harvest was born.

Establishing credibility with top North American chefs wasn’t easy. “I remember calling Daniel [Boulud of restaurants Daniel, DB Bistro Moderne and Café Boulud in the States] two to three times a week for the better part of a year. He’d say, ‘No thanks, I’m fine,’” says Gray, who also remembers days in his not-so-well-appointed basement suite when he would hang up the phone, roll over and go back to sleep. “It was so depressing. I was nervous because I didn’t have a great food knowledge at the time. I had to cultivate an interest.” So he began loitering in Vancouver restaurant kitchens to pick up tips, and travelling to such industry events as the South Beach Food and Wine Festival, where he volunteered at the French Laundry table.

Through perseverance, and the occasional lucky break—“The Inn at Little Washington called out of the blue. Their supplier screwed up and they needed 40 pounds of chanterelles shipped to Chicago that day”—suppliers started approaching Gray, looking for ways to get their products in front of top toques. Mikuni was soon shipping weekly to such top New York and Chicago restaurants as Per Se, Le Bernardin and Moto; Chicago’s Alinea was requesting 50 pounds of Mikuni’s masatake mushrooms twice a week. Annual sales now run upwards of $1.5 million, with 60 percent of that in truffles and mushrooms. Last December, truffle sales alone accounted for $150,000.

Recently, Mikuni hired chefs in California to shop the Santa Monica Farmers Market, hand picking fresh produce like Meyer lemons and specialty lettuces, which get distributed in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Vancouver in vans that pull up right to the restaurant’s back door.
With Mikuni’s newly expanded warehouse in Marpole, Gray invites non-professional foodies to stock their larders with the same products as chefs David Hawksworth (of West) and Joël Robuchon (who’s opened restaurants all over the world). A tip: through June, Mikuni will have fresh wild morel and domestic golden chantrelle mushrooms, as well as black summer truffles from France.

Mikuni Wild Harvest, 870 Aisne St., 866-993-9927, by appointment only.

FROM THE LARDER

Thanks to partnerships with other suppliers, Mikuni stocks gourmet foodstuffs from all over the world.

BACK TO FOOD AND DRINK HOME