What do you visualize when you think of a mushroom farm? You probably don’t, at least I didn’t, until a few weeks ago because I didn’t realize that mushroom farming was a thing. I mean apart from those relatively tasteless white button mushrooms you buy at the supermarket. I assumed that mushrooms grew in the woods and perhaps provided canopies for tiny elves.
But then I visited Tivoli Mushrooms in Hillsdale, NY. Thanks to my daughter Lucy I know a lot more about mushrooms than I did only a year or two ago. What I know is that mushroom foraging is a form of addiction. Lucy vanishes into the forest for hours at a time — after making sure childcare is covered for her twin two-year-olds, though they sometimes join her — and, depending on the time of year and the cooperation of the elements, eventually emerges from the woods with a basketful of shiitakes, golden oysters, lion’s mane and morels.
Thus I would have suspected that a mushroom farm would replicate the natural environment. Maybe absent the elves. It would look something like the Victorian Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden. Or maybe Pee Wee’s Playhouse. A world unto itself filled with trees, fertile soil and a water feature; all in the service of whatever alchemy produces mushrooms in the wild.
It’s nothing like that at all. I’ll get to what it’s actually like momentarily. But first to the visionary behind Tivoli Mushrooms. No, Devon Gilroy doesn’t come from a family of mushroom fairies. But close. He grew up in the restaurant business. His father Bill Gilroy started such well-known New York City restaurants as Lucky Strike, Match and Employees Only. Devon worked in kitchens, including at Chanterelle and A Voce before opening The Corner at the Hotel Tivoli for owners and artists Brice and Helen Marden.
Devon obviously knew about mushrooms as a chef — how to source and how to cook them — but it was while working for the Mardens that he caught the foraging bug, combing his employers’ property on the Hudson River. “It had all these little microclimates,” he recalled. “There were chanterelles in one area and a hundred feet away were black trumpets.”
He was also aware of how finicky mushrooms can be. That’s part of their allure. They only grow in certain places, under certain conditions, with the right amount of moisture. I suppose that’s what makes them so appealing to foragers such as my daughter. It’s like treasure hunting. That’s fine if you’re doing so for fun. But if you’re planning to include them on that night’s restaurant menu it’s helpful if you’re not wholly dependent on nature. You need a dependable source.
Given his background in restaurants and seeing the need, Devon hung up his apron in 2018 and started Tivoli Mushrooms. The business has been growing ever sense, and far more reliably than the wild mushrooms that sparked his journey. He currently supplies such top New York restaurants as Jean-Georges, Craft and Aquavit, as well as local destinations Feast & Floret, Stissing House and the Klocke Estate.
With Devon’s business partner Charlene Chai, he’s also started Go Mushrooms, a medicinal mushroom company. For the sake of full disclosure I should note that as I was writing this column I was under the influence of their tinctures. Charlene loaded me up with samples as well as instructions to take one milligram of each in the morning. Or maybe it was one tincture in the morning and two at night. I resisted at first, but believing that responsible journalism demanded I try the product, I deposited a droplet of Cordyceps, lion’s mane and reishi — said to be good, respectively, for energy, brain power and relaxation — under the tongue.
I felt slightly buzzed but that might just be the power of suggestion. In any case, I visited their operation in Hillsdale on a bright, sunny early autumn day with the foliage approaching peak glory. The weather makes no difference because all the mushroom growing occurs indoors. Apologies if I get any of the science wrong but you start with the substrate. That’s a fancy word for soil and it comes from local hardwood sawdust and soybean husks fashioned into logs. Then it’s hydrated, pasteurized and inoculated with spawn. If that sounds like the human infant embryo pods in the movie The Matrix you wouldn’t be that far off.
The farm, so to speak, is composed of eleven climate-controlled growing chambers with interrogation room overhead florescent lighting, lots of moisture and racks of substrate-filled bags from which pop bouquets of oysters, king trumpets, lion’s mane, maitakes and shiitakes. The company also does a brisk business in seasonally available local foraged wild mushrooms. And they import foraged mushrooms year-round from the Pacific Northwest.
And to answer your question, or at least to answer my question, no they don’t grow magic mushrooms and have no plans to do so. Furthermore, I’m not hallucinating from those tinctures. The company currently distributes a thousand pounds of mushrooms a day, has grown to forty-five full and part-time employees and will, for the first time, turn a profit this year.
That doesn’t mean they’re out of the woods — pun personally quite pleasing but entirely unintended. “We supply an industry that’s very strapped for cash,” Devon noted. Also, New York City restaurant business can drop as much as fifty percent in the summer. Fortunately, farmers markets — among them in Great Barrington, Lenox, Hudson and New York City — help pick up the slack.
If I have any regret about my visit to Tivoli Mushrooms it’s only that I didn’t bring my daughters along — both the forager and her younger sister who, with her husband, is opening a restaurant in Brooklyn next week. I wish them much success as well as a menu abundant with Tivoli mushrooms.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
