Michaël Loyer’s nearly unconditional love for mushrooms led him to want to cultivate his own in his own makeshift mini greenhouse, set up in the sweeper cupboard in his living room. Being a professional chef, it was while buying knives that he met Jim Spathis and Graham Smith, co-owners of a hand-forged knife company, who in turn became interested in this curious little universe. Two weeks later, the three men decided on a whim to found Les 400 pieds de champignon, in (you guessed it) 400 square feet of premises in Côte-des-Neiges. In less than three years, the demand for their fine mushrooms exploded at such lightning speed that they took up residence in a workshop six times larger. The trio grows a dozen varieties, including oyster mushrooms, chestnuts, enokis, coral tooth and lion’s mane, the rarity of which has made the mushroom house famous. Grown in Montreal in a substrate of wood and soy hulls, which is then collected by local farmers to make compost, the mushrooms are picked the day before or the day of your delivery, which makes them the most fresh and local in the market.