Mount Prospect foraging tour pairs mushroom hunting with dinner

On Saturday, June 27, Dave Odd led a Mount Prospect walk that linked neighborhood foraging with a multi-course dinner at Khepri Kitchen + Coffee, 106 S. Emerson. The 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. outing turned edible-plant scouting into a cook-to-table lesson, with mushrooms folded into a wider urban foodscape rather than treated as a standalone hunt.

The program asked participants to read the neighborhood as a pantry. Khepri Kitchen’s event listing said the walk covered more than 50 species of edible plants and possibly mushrooms, then ended with a foraged meal prepared at the restaurant. That structure gave beginners one run through identification, gathering, and eating instead of scattering those lessons across separate classes.

Odd brings unusual range to that format. He says he can identify more than 1,000 edible and medicinal plants and up to 250 species of mushrooms, and he says that wherever he goes he can guarantee attendees will see at least 50 edible things. He has described himself as Chicago’s only full-time professional forager, a claim that fits the event’s emphasis on turning a casual neighborhood walk into a practiced edible-ecology exercise.

The meal mattered as much as the walk. Khepri Kitchen said the dinner was often vegetarian and could be adapted for dietary preferences or allergies, a practical detail that broadened the experience without changing the core idea: foraged ingredients, cooked on site, and served as a multi-course finish to the outing. Pricing split the event into two parts, with the tour listed at $40 per person and the meal at $45.

Khepri Kitchen + Coffee described itself as a small, locally owned scratch kitchen and coffee shop, and the Mount Prospect stop sat inside a wider summer circuit. The organizer’s schedule also listed a June 28 Chicago outing at 4650 N. Kedzie that was marked sold out, showing that the same edible-walk format was already moving across the city and suburbs. Oak Park was also part of the broader lineup.

For mushroom hunters, the appeal was not just the chance to spot fungi, but the way Odd’s route tied habitat reading to dinner. In Mount Prospect, the lesson was clear: the neighborhood itself can be the field guide, and the kitchen can be the final stop.