Chad Hyatt
Chad Hyatt spent a decade cooking in restaurants and private clubs around the San Francisco Bay Area and, for the last 5 years, has worked as a freelance chef specializing in private events. He has been deeply connected to the mushroom community for the last 10 years and has taught about mushrooms and mushroom cookery all over the USA. He wrote and published the groundbreaking The Mushroom Hunter's Kitchen in 2018. Chad is working on a 2nd edition, which should be available in summer 2025. Chad and his wife Rosa first fell in love with the mountains and mushrooms of Arizona in 2015 and return every chance they get.
Julie Schreiber
Consulting Winemaker at Chez Julie SJulie has been collecting, cooking, and eating mushrooms for 30 years. As a professionally trained chef, she has been teaching others about cooking and eating mushrooms for a significant portion of those three decades. In addition to her personal passion for good food and cooking, her formal training in the food and wine industry includes degrees in Hotel Restaurant and Travel Administration from the University of Massachusetts, Culinary Arts from the Culinary Institute of America, and a Master’s Degree in Enology from the University of California at Davis.
She has worked as a chef and is currently a professional winemaker. Additionally, she was on the Sonoma County Mycological Association board for 14 years and the lead chef for culinary events and demos at mushroom forays for David Arora, the Sonoma County Mycological Association (SOMA), the Mycological Society of San Francisco, the North American Mycological Association (NAMA), Wild About Mushrooms (WAM), and Relish Culinary Adventures.
She is a business partner in Mycoventures (https://www.mycoventures.com/wam), a company that organizes local and international mushroom forays. She organizes the events, helps lead the forays, and teach people how to cook cultivated and wild mushrooms.
Most recently she has become the Culinary Arts Committee Chair for the North American Mycological Association (NAMA).
Visit her webpage at: https://chezjulies.com/
Jess Starwood
JstarwoodJess is an author, naturalist, herbalist and wild foods chef with a Masters of Science degree in Herbal Medicine. She recently published Mushroom Wanderland: A Forager’s Guide to Finding, Identifying and Using More Than 25 Wild Fungi with Countryman Press. Jess has worked as a wild-foods consultant and forager for Los Angeles chefs Aitor Zabala of Somni and Niki Nakayama of n/naka. Jess has been teaching wild foods and nature education classes for children and adults since 2014. She founded The Wild Path School, a wild-food apprenticeship and education program, in 2020 that strives to connect the community to nature and the foods we eat in a positive, healing and sustainable way. She also leads immersive foraging adventures, multi-course gourmet wild food dinners and other food-focused experiences on the West Coast, Southwest United States and Mexico. Jess is the editor of The Sporeprint, heads the Mycophagy & Culinary Group (McLAMS) for the NAMA-affiliated Los Angeles Mycological Society, as well as a new board member for the NAMA-affiliated Arizona Mushroom Society. Visit her websites at thewildpath.org and jstarwood.com.
Dr. Gordon Walker
Fascinated By FungiDr. Gordon Walker is originally from Cambridge, MA but also spent time growing up on the Northshore of Massachusetts. He attended UC Santa Cruz, obtaining a B.S. in Biochemistry. He then attended UC Davis, where he completed his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He then worked for Opus One winery, isolating wild yeasts and pioneering new wine technologies. He spent time working in biotechnology around the Bay Area, then returned to UC Davis where he completed post-doctoral work on fermentation process control. Besides his passion for all things fungi and fermentation, he is an avid chef, forager, sailor, SCUBA diver and gardener. He resides in Napa, CA.
