Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

dmarina-

I've seen some restaurants describe a dish containing EXOTIC mushrooms like shitake, oyster, hens nest, etc as WILD, when in fact they are not.
In my state, the use of REAL wild mushrooms (shrooms picked by hand out in the forest, NOT cultivated) is illegal. I agree with this because its a tricky business. MOST, but not all mushroom poisoning cases involve asian immigrants who pick shrooms that appear like those from their home country. In many cases they are not. In my case, my family is from Italy. We picked only 3 kinds that we KNEW were safe, one being the now cultivated hens nest mushroom. Even so, I remember one unpleasant evening spent paying for a misidentified mushroom feast.

I'm sure some of the "housemade" descriptions are pretentious in nature (but this is the restaurant business, the only PHONIER bunch are in hollywood)

But, I know is at least SOME cases, its called "HOUSEmade" instead of "HOMEmade" because of health department restrictions. In my district, the word HOMEMADE can't be used because according to these anal retentive weirdos, actual products made at HOME are NOT allowed to be sold to the public. Don't you have something to do? Important?

Oh well, we can't use the words "wild" mushrooms either. That I understand more because WILD and EXOTIC are two different things, but actual wild mushrooms are a no no too. And in the case of some ethnic restaurants, probably not a bad idea.