Vancouver’s First Exotic Mushroom Store

For seven years, from 2015 to 2022, Pacific Rim Mushrooms had a storefront in Richmond, BC, under the same name you see on our labels today. It was the first store in the Vancouver area built around exotic mushrooms, fresh and dried, and its job was simple: get the best of BC’s wild harvest into people’s kitchens.

After two decades of picking and buying mushrooms in the backcountry, a storefront was the natural next step. Instead of shipping everything away, we could hand it straight to the people cooking with it.

A shop run in Chinese

Almost all of our customers were Chinese, so the shop was run by a Chinese-speaking team who could serve them properly.

I don’t speak Chinese, so I couldn’t work the counter myself. I worked behind the scenes, and when I needed to talk with the team we used a translation app on our phones. The store really belonged to the people who ran it and the customers who kept coming back.

Our own line of dried mushrooms

The heart of the store was wild mushrooms, dried all year round and fresh in season. We packed our own line of dried mushrooms in white and green Pacific Rim bags, each one showing the mushroom inside. The shelves held Matsutake, Morels, Porcini, Chanterelles, Lobster mushrooms, Yellowfoot, Black Trumpets and Candy Caps, with wild Chaga and wild rice alongside them. Drying locks in a mushroom’s flavour and lets it keep for months, so the dried line kept the shelves full long after each season had ended.

Dried Morels had baskets of their own as well as a spot on the shelves. Chaga came in rough chunks, just as it grows on the birch tree, long before it went into our elixir drops.

Fresh in season

When the season was on, fresh mushrooms came through the door by the box: Morels in spring, Pine mushrooms (Matsutake) in autumn, golden Chanterelles, bright orange Lobster mushrooms, ruffled Cauliflower mushrooms and more.

More than mushrooms

Around the mushrooms were other wild and local foods: huckleberries, wild rice, local honey and more. If it came from BC’s forests and was worth eating, we tried to have it.

Pine mushrooms, sorted by grade

Pine mushrooms were sold by grade. The tight, closed buttons were number one, and the grades went down as the caps opened.

Drying it right

Dried mushrooms are only as good as the drying. Morels went onto long screened racks in the open air, turned and checked until they were ready to pack.

Bear’s tooth and a hint of what came next

Bear’s tooth is a close cousin of Lion’s Mane. Both belong to the Hericium family, with the same soft, icicle-like spines. Handling it in the shop is part of the road that led us to the Lion’s Mane extracts we make today.

What the shop taught us

A store teaches you things the forest can’t. Through our team we learned what people wanted to cook, what they were curious about and what they came back for. Many of those questions later turned into the guides on this website, like our Mushroom Buyer’s Guide.

You hear what people want to cook, what they’re curious about and what they come back for.

On to the next thing

In 2022 it was time to move on to the next thing. We closed the Richmond shop and put everything into mushroom extracts made from organically grown fruiting bodies, like our Lion’s Mane Elixir Drops and Chaga Elixir. The wild foods are part of our history now, but the way we choose quality hasn’t changed.

Thank you to everyone who came through the door in those seven years. If you were one of them, we’d love to hear from you.