What is Simply Shroom Café?
Fifth Avenue has had a lot of drink trends pass through it. Simply Shroom Café is betting on the newest one: functional mushrooms, in everything, and pink, everywhere.
The café opened at 7077 E 5th Ave in summer 2024, the project of two friends turned business partners, Crystal Carroll and Sharmi Kneller, who described it as a café “by women, for women.” Their hook is a proprietary 4-M extract, a blend of reishi, shiitake, antrodia and oyster mushrooms that goes into every coffee, tea, spritzer and smoothie as a micro-scoop. The café insists you won’t taste or smell it, and the drinks bear that out: a latte here tastes like a latte. What you are buying is the idea, plus a very good-looking room.
And the room is the second hook. A large pink mushroom mural covers one wall, mushroom-shaped lamps sit on the tables, signs are cheeky, and even the bathroom tiles and tray liners talk up mushrooms. The baristas are called shrooministas and are trained to explain the blend. It is designed to be photographed, and it is.
The food is a tidy daytime menu built for the same customer: egg bites with pesto and microgreens, avocado toast, a Maple Dijon chicken sandwich on sourdough, and the vegan Portobello Road salad or wrap, with gluten-free and vegan options throughout. Treat the wellness claims with the skepticism you’d bring to any supplement; treat the sandwich as a sandwich. Both are what they say they are.
Ordering, timing, and what to make of it
Start plain. The best way to understand the place is a straight latte or cappuccino, which tells you the coffee underneath the concept is fine on its own. From there, the menu gets more playful: white mochas, a pink drink, and smoothies like the Blushing Beauty, with strawberries, banana, dates, vanilla collagen and coconut milk. The baristas will write messages in the foam if you ask.
Eat early. Simply Shroom is a breakfast-and-lunch café that closes in mid-afternoon, and its open days have changed since launch, so check the website before planning around it. Mornings are the calm window; weekend late mornings bring the brunch crowd that also lines up at Berdena’s a few doors west.
Know what you’re buying at the shelf. The café doubles as the brand’s showroom, selling mushroom gummies, capsules and other branded products alongside the menu. Those are supplements, marketed for energy, focus, mood and skin; the company’s own fine print notes the claims have not been evaluated by the FDA. Buy them because you’re curious, not because a mural told you to.
Make it part of a Fifth Avenue morning. Coffee here, then the boutiques and jewelry cases of the Fifth Avenue shops, then the 1955 courtyard of Craftsman Court around the corner, is an easy two-hour loop. For a coffee-purist counterpoint, Cartel Roasting Co. is a few minutes east; the best coffee shops note covers the rest.
Mushrooms on a street of trends
Fifth Avenue has always sold whatever the winter visitor wanted next. In the 1950s that meant handmade silver and resort fashion; by the 2010s it meant a latte. The street’s modern morning economy really began when Berdena’s opened its tiny coffee bar in 2017 and showed that a well-designed café could pull people onto Fifth Avenue hours before the boutiques opened. Simply Shroom is a 2020s answer to the same opportunity, with the wellness boom layered on top.
The founders came to it from business rather than coffee. Kneller had spent years in the pharmaceutical industry and appeared on Shark Tank in its ninth season with SmartGurlz, a toy brand for girls; Carroll had run a background-check company, worked in quick-service restaurants for about twenty years and managed commercial property. That background shows in the plan. The Scottsdale café is explicitly a flagship, the showcase for a brand that sells packaged products online and announced franchise expansion to Nevada, California, Colorado and beyond.
Whether functional mushrooms are a lasting habit or a passing trend, the café’s bet is that a pleasant room and decent food will carry it either way. That is a sensible hedge on a street where concepts come and go and only the useful ones last.
The honest assessment: the mushroom pitch is marketing first, and the health language deserves a raised eyebrow. But the room is cheerful, the drinks taste like good café drinks, the food is light and well made, and the women-led, cheerfully pink identity gives it more personality than most new cafés on the block. Go for a latte and a sandwich. Skip the gummies unless you’re curious.