Mushroom Café

The Mushroom Cafe, located in the Grey House at CoSM, serves delicious wraps, paninis, great coffee and teas, local kombucha, desserts featuring vegan and gluten-free options, and more. Treat your eyes to the Mushroom Cafe mural:

Mycelium, the neurological network of nature, infuses habitats with interlacing mosaics of information-sharing membranes, aware and reacting to change, with a collective intent for the long-term health of the host environment. In constant molecular communication with its surroundings, fungus in nature devises diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.
— Paul Stamets, American mycologist, author, advocate of bioremediation, expert on medicinal fungi.

During renovation of the 1862 Visionary Victorian at CoSM, now called Grey House, The Mushroom Cafe became a feature of the transformed floor plan, proposed by CoSM Head Builder, Brian James. Eliminate one of the two foyer bathrooms and combine it with a utility room to create a unique, mushroom-shaped cafe. CoSM NYC, open in Manhattan from 2004-2009, had no cafe. The Grey’s seized this opportunity to create The Mushroom Cafe. Lenny Hart and Joey Styles beautifully built and tiled the Cafe Bar.

Artists invited to create an original work in the Mushroom Cafe were selected in light of their demonstrated accomplishment as artists, their ability to find their way to CoSM, their willingness to contribute their mural, their richness of imagination, their demonstrated technical proficiency and reliability.

Nature herself is the greatest artist, visionary, and entheogen all rolled into one. All art originating in an artist’s mind is Visionary. The term “visionary” is used to identify art of an imaginative and often spiritual nature. The Mushroom Cafe is a tiny grotto filled with fleeting visions from warped and twisted minds.
— Mark Henson, artist, MAGI, Mushroom Cafe muralist