Forager and food entrepreneur Iso Rabins is making a career by following his nose.

“I can’t get enough of the ocean right now,” says Iso Rabins, San Francisco’s best-known food forager. “If I get really interested in something, I want to spend all my time doing it.” Rabins’ preoccupation with abalone diving, seaweed collecting, and spearfishing should come as exceptionally good news to the city’s seafood fans—or anyone who’s previously followed where Rabins’ eclectic interests have led him.

Rabins made his name in San Francisco food circles after moving to northern California from Vermont, when he met a group of mushroom foragers. “I became fascinated that they did this for a living,” he says. “They would go out into the woods and find mushrooms—and that was their full-time job.” Soon enough, Rabins was peddling wild mushrooms to the back doors of San Francisco’s restaurants (Chris Constentino from Incanto was his first customer). He split the profits with the other foragers, and a food empire was born.

Rabins subsequently founded ForageSF, which unifies his various food-related ventures: the now-defunct Underground Market (“I wanted to be in a farmer’s market, but they kind of wouldn’t let me in, so I started my own”); his ongoing Wild Kitchen dinners (a roving supper club featuring his wild foraged creations); and his latest passion project, Forage Kitchen, with test kitchens, classrooms, a meat-curing area, even a rooftop garden. “It’s the space I always wanted when I was starting a business,” Rabin says. He raised over $150,000 to fund it on Kickstarter in 2012; he’s currently negotiating lease terms with a landlord and will blog about the space’s development for SF Weekly.

Wild Kitchen also demands Rabins’ attention. Cooking was a natural next step, and he explored the culinary possibilities of foraged ingredients through trial and error. “I’m self-taught,” he says. “With foraged foods, there’s a lot that hasn’t been done, so there’s freedom to experiment.” To help guide him, he’ll note what chefs have created using cultivated ingredients and, in his words, “turn it 20 degrees to make it a little bit different.” One such result includes a candy cap mushroom crème brulee, now a signature dish. Now, given his burgeoning interest in the sea, Rabins says he’d like to develop a foraged, distilled liquor using seaweed, herbs, or eucalyptus. It’s all “super new” for Rabins—a very good sign of things to come.

Photographs by Andria Lo