This City Mushroom Farm Grows Fungi For Chicago’s Top Chefs — And ‘The Bear’

WEST LOOP — In one of many memorable kitchen scenes from “The Bear,” chef Carmy Berzatto is defending an $11,268 bill for butter to an angry Uncle Jimmy.

Laid out on a tray and cutting board in front of him are an array of mushrooms.

“It’s Orwellian … Orwell, Vermont,” Carmy, played by Jeremy Allen White, says of the butter. “It’s the best.”

Orwellian butter may be fictional, but the mushrooms are real. Grown by Four Star Mushrooms at its West Loop indoor regenerative farm, they’ve appeared in multiple seasons of the Emmy-winning FX series, said Joe Weber, Four Star co-founder and president.

One of their biggest cameos came in the acclaimed season 2 episode “Forks,” filmed in part at two-Michelin-starred restaurant Ever in Fulton Market. Four Star supplied roughly 20 cases of mushrooms used to cover a table in the episode.

Indeed, Four Star’s connection to “The Bear” began through Ever, where a chef working as a culinary consultant for the show recruited some of the restaurant’s longtime vendors for the production, Weber said.

“They called us, and they’re like, ‘Hey, we need like 20 cases of mushrooms tomorrow,’” Weber said. “It was pretty cool to see that come onscreen.”

The television appearances are one sign of how far Four Star Mushrooms has come since the company began in 2019 inside a roughly 400-square-foot shared warehouse in Logan Square, where Weber and his business partner determined how to reliably and sustainably grow specialty mushrooms — and whether people would buy them.

In 2022, Four Star moved into its current home at 320 N. Oakley Blvd. The indoor farm now occupies about 14,000 square feet and produces seven types of mushrooms year-round, including lion’s mane, chestnut, blue oyster, black oyster, king trumpet, maitake and golden enoki mushrooms.

The company has also grown from an operation largely run by Weber into a 10-person operation with seven production workers and a three-person fulfillment team.

Four Star now supplies and delivers to a few hundred restaurants across the Chicago area over the course of the year, Weber said. Restaurants and other foodservice customers make up about 75 percent of Four Star’s business, while the remaining 25 percent comes from grocery and retail sales.

“We’ve had a pretty big vision for where we want the company to be for a long time,” Weber said. “Things just take longer than you expect and are harder.”

Scaling Sustainably

Four Star continues to develop relationships with some of Chicago’s most acclaimed restaurants, the closest among them being three-Michelin-starred Smyth — recently named the No. 1 restaurant in North America by the World’s 50 Best. Weber began growing golden enoki mushrooms specifically for the West Loop restaurant and now delivers to them five days a week.

Four Star also supplies Maxwell’s Trading, Monteverde, Cindy’s Rooftop, The Dearborn, Lula Cafe, Longman & Eagle and many more restaurants in Chicago. But Weber wants people to know the mushrooms are not limited to Michelin-starred and award-winning dining rooms.

Four Star mushrooms are also sold at Jewel-Osco, Mariano’s and Fresh Thyme stores and at Agora Market in Bucktown. Jewel carries the company’s blue oyster and lion’s mane mushrooms, along with a mushroom medley, while other retailers carry six other varieties.

“My biggest priority right now is making sure that people know that they can now find us at retail stores, too,” Weber said. “I think we’ve kind of had this idea that we’re only at these Michelin-star restaurants.”

The company has drawn attention not only from Chicago’s culinary elite but also from environmental advocates.

Its West Loop facilities were highlighted during a tour spearheaded by the 2026 Aspen Ideas Festival, a climate solutions conference that convened in Chicago this month. Four Star Mushrooms was highlighted as a “carbon-negative, zero-waste, vertically integrated model” and was so popular with attendees that the tour was waitlisted. 

A diverse group of about 30 public health practitioners, researchers, business leaders, policymakers and scientists converged on Four Star Mushrooms to learn how indoor mushroom cultivation supports a more resilient food system by turning agricultural and wood-industry byproducts into food and soil amendments.

Tour attendees peppered Weber with questions about the farm’s environmental impact and potential: How much energy does it take to keep the facility cool year-round? How did the farm handle recent wildfire smoke? Could invasive plants be turned into mushroom-growing material?

Four Star grows its mushrooms on a mix of organic soybean hulls and red oak sawdust, much of it sourced as a byproduct of furniture and bourbon-barrel production. The company is exploring ways to use other local waste materials, including spent grain from breweries.

“We really think that regenerative agriculture is the key to building a more just, resilient planet,” Weber told tour attendees.

Farming For The Next Generation

Inside the facility, rows of plastic growing blocks fill temperature-controlled rooms where clusters of mushrooms push through the openings of the bags.

The process begins with the soybean hull and sawdust mixture, which is packed into bags, heated to reduce contamination and inoculated with mycelium. The growing blocks are then moved through controlled rooms that regulate temperature, humidity and airflow until the mushrooms are ready to harvest, which can take one to two months, depending on the variety.

Four Star gives away some of its “substrate,” the blocks of soybean hull and sawdust, to the community after the mushrooms are harvested. What’s left over is considered nutrient-dense and perfect for gardening.

Eventually, Weber wants to process the spent material into soil at a larger scale and use it to grow other nutrient-dense foods, he told tour attendees.

“We’ve always had a vision of being this kind of example for our community, our city, the world of what the next generation of farming is,” Weber said. “This is part of what it’s going to look like.”

Four Star has held community tours and events focused on sustainability; most recently, it hosted a luncheon tied to the Wall Street Journal’s Global Food Forum. Weber said the interest helps validate the company’s mission, particularly when growth takes longer than anticipated.

“People are eager for a food system that looks completely different than the one that we have right now,” Weber said.

For now, Weber expects Four Star to remain at its location, where the company has room to host public programs. Four Star could sell at the Logan Square Farmers Market or join Green City Market as early as next year, primarily as a way to connect directly with the public, he said.

Longer term, Weber wants Four Star to move beyond its current niche in Chicago’s upscale restaurant market. Potential customers could include fast-casual chains such as Sweetgreen or, on a much larger scale, Chipotle, companies that could introduce the company’s sustainable model to significantly more people.

“We love our customers, but we’re really just in Chicago,” Weber said. “There’s a lot of opportunity to spread the word at these different levels if we can get the production to work out.”