A Recap of MycoThailand 2026... and a Preview of MycoThailand 2027!

I started writing this recap after we'd been home for about a week. Time has flown as I digest the adventure we just completed. 20,000 miles of flights, 3000 miles of driving, 7 weeks away from our home in Mexico, four countries, four languages, and a lot of wildly bizarre mushrooms and mushroom people! So bear with me if I go on a little long: this adventure and all the people involved making it happen deserve it. Credit where credit is due! (I am leaving out our Japan bookend adventures, since the Thai trip was just so involved, and needs to have your undivided attention.)

If you don’t see our socials, what I am referencing is that Kim and I just hosted a 6-years-in-the-making mushroom foraging adventure in Thailand. This trip was part homage to our connections of mushroom friends throughout Lanna, part lets-see-if-we-can-pull-this-off, since Thai mushroom season is the same as Mexico’s mushroom season (the similarities between the two countries are pretty incredible), and part due to a homesickness we feel for Thailand, a trip to truly showcase in 11 short days what Thailand means to us.

A Trip 6 Years in the Making!

We met our group of 5 where Kim and I actually began our COVID Thailand adventure 6 years ago, at Petcharatana Court. Pet Court was our home for 80 weeks during the pandemic and after this trip was reinforced as our family-home-away-from-home. The relationships we formed during those unstable and bizarre years in Northern Thailand have become almost a home-away-from-home for us. Our Thai family, if you will. The opportunity to bring together all of our contacts, as well as some new Crown Jewel level friends and contacts, such as our guide Tieu was almost to much to believe real as it was happening, and it thrills me to recount this adventure here.

For example, our restaurant options were selected by our wonderful guide Tieu, and we managed again and again to eat some of the most incredible Northern Thail cuisine for every meal... this is as much a food tour as a mushroom tour, without a doubt!

We kicked off with opening dinner at Ekachan: The Wisdom of Ethnic Thai Cuisine, that set the tone immediately! A full array of delicious, beautifully plated NorthernThai food, and the first of what turned out to be several stops at Michelin Guide recommended food stops… mushroom tour?…sure…food tour?.. definitely! I want to shout out to our amazing group of attendees who had zero qualms about Thai spicy and trying everything, you guys made the diversity of the cuisine unfathomable!

Full day one proper started at the Chiang Mai Gate Market with Khun Ae, buying what we'd cook that evening. This is the market at which Kim and I shopped three or four times a week during the pandemics first year and half, and where I learned my culinary Thai, and about the massive array of ingredients. It is so familiar, more so than even our own home market in Mexico, if I'm honest.  Our first hike was the fairly easy to navigate Monk's Trail hike up to Wat Pha Lad, the Emerald Forest Temple, and nearly impossible stone edifice cut into a stream bed and covered in moss and orchids.A good warm up for the week, the climb that felt very earned by the time we hit Han Tueng for lunch (the best Northern Thai menus I’ve ever seen), another Michelin recommended eatery with a menu so vast I shared it to IG in my own dismay at just how little I still know about Northern Thai food. Even after spending a year writing a book about it!

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The impossibly complex and extensive menu at the Michelin-recognized Han Tueng restaurant in Chiang Mai.

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That evening, Khun Ae ran her cooking class the way only she can: everyone making their own dish, learning Lanna style hands-on. The array of dishes, 6 in total, seemed an impossible task for each person to construct their own, but Khun Ae, my primary culinary instructor when I was writing my yet-unpublished cookbook memoir “A Chef’s Journey into the heart of Lanna,”, is an absolute magician in the kitchen. Her staff easily set and reset each dish for each attendee, and the food that came out was delicious from each and every person. One of the most important tenets that I lay out in my book, contrary to every perfectly measured recipe-following cookbook out there, is that Lanna Cuisine doesn’t use recipes, just dishes that have a constellation of ingredients, the make-up of which vary by household, there is no correct way to make Nam Phrik Ong, for example, the Lanna version of bolognese, for lack of a better description, an apt as well, as there is no correct way to make most Italian paste sauces either (though there are certainly endless incorrect ways to make either!). Khun Ae’s class did exactly this, inviting each of our attendees to add as they felt fit each of the aromatic ingredients. The result was a variety of similar but not identical dishes, the essence of this cuisine. Just brilliant.

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The following day, we set off for the Hmong village on Doi Pui, from which we started our hike up to 5,300 feet through pine forest that genuinely doesn't feel like it belongs in Thailand. Lunch, a simple meal cooked in the traditional Hmong fashion, was eaten while our host, through our guide and translator Tieu, told us of the story of his family, and this village. That lunch, despite all of the dishes eaten throughout the week, is the most mentioned food of the whole trip. 

On the way back to Pet Court, we detoured for the afternoon with our friends at Potent Fungi, whose tea house plans we had seen last January, but which opened three weeks before we walked in with our group. What timing! We have been speaking with Adam for the last year and a half to make some of these plans, and it was amazing to see his work in action!, and so beautiful! Adam walked us through the lab, we sipped the best mocktails (laced with cordyceps) I have ever tasted, and it felt like exactly the kind of serendipity our trip are built to invite.

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Heading North

From there we departed dear Chiang Mai to go deeper into the mountains of the North. First, a stop at the Queen Sirikit Botanical Gardens (2,500 hectares, we didn't scratch the surface),  stunning bio-reserve outside of Mae Rim, then a riverside lunch, feet cooling in the water. Did I say how proud I am of our groups propensity to try and to eat everything and anything?!? “Ped Thai, mai Pad Thai” is the slogan. We took the group for a surprise afternoon soak at Pong Arng Hot Springs, close to the Myanmar border, before settling into our converted rice field accommodations for three rainy nights. Dinner that night, at the restaurant whose name Google Maps still won't translate for us, may have been the best meal of the trip. Of course we said that about every meal, but that is saying something. Every meal. We are setting a high bar, we know.

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Heart of Jelly

I’ve talked about this epic day in the past, and honestly, having it come to fruition was one of the most satisfying days of this entire adventure. The same Mr. Kong, who in January of 2025 had met us with a handwritten list of 14 mushrooms, Latin, Thai, and Akha names all written out by hand, brought us into his community, all of whom were ready to share their world with us. The day was clearly delineated and divided into two parts: part the first - we spent the wettest day of our lives foraging in a bamboo forest for whatever we could find, and apparently bamboo jelly--which I didn't know existed until the moment the timber bamboo was cut open--to make into a Thai salad [Yum]... this was my favorite dish of the week! What's more, despite the downpour that only increased throughout our 5 hour excursion, our guides built a fire that somehow stayed lit, cooked with bamboo as bowls and funnels and roasting sticks, and ate a rugged rainy meal, drenched by sweat inside the ponchos and rain without. We couldn't have asked for a better group, I tell you. Such good spirits!

Part the second - Because we get what we need, of course the rain stopped just as we returned to the village, drenched, exhausted, muddy, and so happy. What waited for us was even more astounding! A feast of so many dishes of traditional foods, laid-out family style service, and then a demonstration of traditional dance with opening and closing bamboo poles, a bit like jump-rope, a bit like hop scotch, and a lot of fun! Once again the meal was unique and utterly delicious, tasting their farmed goods, pumpkin, corn, peanuts, chiles, chicken, other squashes, and so many unnamed greens (quelites!).

Not to lose momentum the following day we set out for a hike with SunTan (follow him @ichiangdao. His photos are unreal), and learned from his hilltribe companions about the forestry work they do, the fire lines during dry season, the education of the local populace, and the inclusion of everyone in the project, it was beginning to feel identical to the Mexican highlands and our friends in the communities there! 

Thailand wouldn’t be complete without textiles and dyeing, and with Kim’s growing expertise and fascination with that world, we spent an afternoon with Huey at Studio Chiang Dao Blue, learning her indigo process and making several pieces of our own to take home.  Her methods are a type of color mysticism that is hard to describe, her vats of indigo, alive and murky yellow green, have been going for 9 years. The process was clearly alchemy, the knowledge of nature needed to even consider indigo producing plants is astounding. 

On our way back to the bustling city of Chiang Mai from our deepest jungle point, we swung through the Bai Orchid and Butterfly garden. And of course we dropped in another genuinely stunning Michelin-rated lunch at Baan Landai. Miang Kam in Lotus leaves is a thing. And it is as beautiful as it is tasty. This was all in order to keep our most important appointment: a chaperoned visit to the medicinal mushroom cultivation program at Maejo University — a first for all of us, and one of the most fascinating stops of the whole week. The variety of mushrooms they are growing, products they are creating, and their international educational outreach to teach others how to replicate their methods was amazing to learn about. 

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For our final Saturday together as a group, we continued past Chiang Mai, south to the surroundings of Doi Inthanon--Thailand's highest peak topping out just above 8000ft--to spend the morning with Attitaya, or Ati.  Ati, whom we met in 2020 at a local market, not only grows her own cotton and spins her own thread, but weaves it into some of the most beautiful clothing we have even seen, exquisite pieces rivaling silk in their softness and quality. She explained her laborious process to the group, all the while showing off literal years of handiworks hanging neatly in her studio and cooking us a delicious lunch with most items right from her incredible little farm. 

Finally, for our last hands-on experience, we paid a visit to Chiang Mai Home Host for a second cooking class, but more than that, an evening with an extended family who have lived on this land for more than 150 years, and who run guests through a curated experience of a day in a traditional Lanna home, finishing with a wonderfully fun and put together cooking class, including mushrooms, of course, and then eating our dinner together before heading back to the Old City to rest before our final day together!

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And lastly...

And our final full day in the city was pure market goodness! The Sunday-only Cham Cha Market is a collective of incredible chic and creative artisans with everything from embroidery to indigo dyeing to weaving, crochet, antiques… you name it. It happens to also be the home for our final lunch at Meena Rice Based Cuisine, another Michelin-recommended Northern Thai restaurant right at the end of the main walking street of the market.

The reality of the end of the trip setting in, we set our group free to explore the absolute chaos of the Sunday Night Market before our final dinner together at The House by Ginger, one of the classic delicious restaurants in Chiang Mai Old Town, but right inside the moat (and the most Michelin decorated joint of them yet... what an absolute treat of a culiary tour this was!). We bid our guide Tieu farewell, and ate our hearts content at this final stop, just gobsmacked at our experiences, the dishes, the jungle, the hilltribe experiences, the mushrooms; the whole experience was a fast-paced wild ride through everything that make Thailand come alive for us, and we more than successfully shared it with our intrepid group of superstars... so much so that we are going to DO IT AGAIN IN 2027!!  Be the first to know about it HERE!!!

I mentioned him ad nauseum, but we could not have done any of this without Tieu, his passion for sharing Chiang Mai, and his nam jai (the thai spirit of service, literally “heart water”) and such a good human. And we couldn't have asked for a better group to share it with — they showed up curious, hungry, and game for anything, rain or shine (mostly rain, but that's what the mushrooms demand). We are thrilled to put together new itinerary to explore even more of what Tieu recommends, as he is an enthusiastic expert of all things northern Thailand!

We are so so so excited for our return in 2027, and we can't wait to share our Thailand with you!

Of course, if you're craving more mushroom foraging a little closer to home, our Mexico trips are where MycoThai started and they're just as wild in their own way! 

Get your name on our TELL ME FIRST for 2027 LIST NOW to get special discounts and exclusive access to our trips in just a few weeks!

Khubkhunkrap,
Team Fungivore: Zack & Kim