Community Highlight: Amanita
A new café has opened on the corner of W. Walnut and N. Charlotte Streets in downtown Lancaster — providing local food lovers with an utterly unique spot for breakfast, lunch, and coffee in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood.
Amanita Café is focused on, “working with producers and other local businesses who are also sourcing their products ethically, locally, and in small batches with ingredients that are grown organically and, if at all possible, regeneratively. Growing something in a regenerative manner is working to create systems that are healing themselves,” explained Robyn Mello, owner-administrator at Amanita.
Mello continued, “A good way of putting it concisely is that we are people that are trying to leave the world better than we found it.”
What can you expect from Amanita Café?
The café opened in early October, serving breakfast favorites including bagel sandwiches, oatmeal, shakshuka, and a vegan breakfast (house-made mushroom polenta, served with toast, plant-based chorizo, and citrus slices). For lunch, they’re offering up dishes like slow-cooked beef on sourdough, salad options, and “snack” portions of Martin’s pretzels, a mezze platter, and more.
They’re also serving up Zen Bunni’s Coffee of the Cosmos — what Mello calls “the best coffee that we've ever tasted.”
“It's pretty awesome. Even some of our first customers and the baristas that we've hired are kind of blown away by the flavor and balance of this coffee. It's grown biodynamically in Peru, and it's just phenomenal,” Mello said.
Where did their name come from?
Amanita’s owners are self-identified “mycophiles” (that is, lovers of mushrooms), according to Mello. So much so that they named the shop after a genus they particularly enjoy and appreciate.
“Amanita is the name [of the café] to honor a group of mushrooms that are very powerful, that have been consumed and revered by cultures all over Europe, and possibly all over the world, for many, many generations,” Mello said. “They're powerful. They're considered magical by certain communities, and we wanted to bring that power and that energy into our space through the name.”
“We are lovers of mushrooms. We consume them in the form of herbal medicine, we cook with them as often as possible,” Mello shared. “One of our main partners is Mycopolitan Mushroom Company. They’re a mushroom farm based in Philadelphia that we have been partnered with through various means since about 2014 when they opened. They are phenomenal people with great work ethic and similar vision.”
Who is behind Amanita?
From the name and menu to the space design and staff hires, every single aspect of Amanita Cafe has been deeply considered and intentionally selected by their ten-person ownership team, in an effort to design a space that serves delicious, Earth-focused, ethically-sourced food, and beverages.
“We're a really diverse group of people from diverse backgrounds, professionally, as well as ethnically, culturally, and spiritually — but we all have a mutual interest and passion in healing the planet and providing alternative options for people that are healthy, planet- and human-forward,” Mello shared.
She continued, “We have a passion for good food, high-quality ingredients, and regenerative agriculture.”
For more information, visit www.amanitacafe.com
By: Maddy Pontz
