What accomplished home cook hasn’t fantasized about opening a restaurant? Usually, that fantasy fizzles right at the point where hundreds of thousands of dollars are needed to sign a lease.
But a 2019 California law makes the path to having a full-fledged business surprisingly short.
In certain counties, the health department can certify a private home as a Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation, or MEHKO, and within a month or two, hopeful entrepreneurs can go from cooking for friends and family to bagging up takeout orders and even serving customers in their backyard. Legally.
Cooks without access to capital have long run home food businesses — out of entrepreneurial derring-do, financial need or both — but they’ve had to do so in the shadows. What would it look like — especially in a vast, diverse and vibrant county like Los Angeles — when anyone can open a restaurant in their home?
Riverside County, California, in the outer reaches of Greater Los Angeles, was the first to adopt the MEHKO ordinance. Since enacting it in 2019, the county has had an explosion of businesses run out of homes by community members of all sorts. Veteran restaurateurs looking to streamline, seasoned home cooks trying to monetize their skills and aspiring chefs learning the ropes have all jumped in.
Cali Tardka
A seasoned takeout business
The best known MEHKO in Riverside County is Cali Tardka, run by Kimi Sanghu and her son, Manav. It’s a takeout-only operation that serves a menu of Indian restaurant classics like samosas and chicken tikka masala.
They started the business in 2018, after Kimi Sanghu’s husband, Avtar, lost his job. She had always taken pride in her cooking, so she began selling her food on Facebook Marketplace to help keep the family afloat. One day, they received a call from the local health department. They had to shut down for months, and Sanghu worried that her family would become homeless.
“I didn’t know we needed a license,” she said.
When Riverside County adopted the MEHKO program, Sanghu obtained the very first license. She reopened her business, and has been working at it day and night ever since. “If the need goes deep, you don’t quit easily,” she said.
Sanghu is the primary cook. She makes everything, including the sauces and french fries, from scratch. Her son handles taking orders, running food out to cars and promoting the restaurant on social media — a vital part of the operation.
It’s difficult to get the word out about a MEHKO. There’s very little chance of someone driving by and just deciding to stop in, and under the ordinance MEHKOs are not allowed to use popular third-party apps like DoorDash or UberEats.
Cali Tardka has repeatedly gone viral on TikTok, and the following the restaurant has built keeps the business alive. TikTok and Instagram drive customers to the Sanghus’ door in a way almost nothing else can.
Tiny Saigon
A dine-in restaurant comes home
Another way to succeed as a MEHKO is to have an existing following. Tiny Saigon, a newly opened spot in Corona, is run by a couple who used to own a popular Vietnamese restaurant in a strip mall nearby. Tram Ngo, a co-owner, said she enjoyed having a restaurant, but disliked the way a lease tied her family to long hours and no vacations.
She and her husband, Dung Le, turned their back patio, which looks out over the Santa Ana Mountains, into a restaurant where they serve a tight menu of pho and rice and noodle dishes. They’re open five days a week for takeout or dine-in.
It’s still a lot of work, but Ngo prefers it to traditional restaurant life. “In the morning, I sleep until I want to wake up, and we prep throughout the day,” she said. And going cashless makes her feel safe enough to invite strangers into her home, she said, since “we don’t have anything to take.”
Moving from a stand-alone restaurant business isn’t all upside, however. A licensed kitchen can’t sell more than 30 meals a day, for instance, or make more than $100,000 in sales in a year. That’s double what the original law allowed — the cap was raised in 2023 — but to Ngo, it still makes the math tricky.
“If the cost of goods is $50,000, then that leaves $50,000 split between two people,” Ngo said. “Does that make sense?”
Thee Real McCoy Experience
A first taste of food entrepreneurship
In June, Dee Anderson McCoy and her husband, Cedric, opened a soul food restaurant called Thee Real McCoy Experience in their backyard in Moreno Valley. Cedric McCoy is enrolled in culinary school as part of a career change, but neither has worked in restaurants before. They opened on Fridays and Saturdays and served whoever came by or called to put in an order.
A few would-be customers didn’t understand that, yes, this was a legally permitted restaurant where anyone could walk in and enjoy a meal. Confused callers asked why the Google listing showed a house. “We started out saying ‘home restaurant,’ and having to explain,” Anderson McCoy said. “We switched to saying ‘licensed facility.’”
But without a social media following, and no access to major delivery apps, business could be slow, and food costs added up. “Sitting there all day, hoping and waiting for someone to come through, and then they don’t, that’s hundreds of dollars you lost,” Anderson McCoy said.
To Cedric McCoy, there was one bright side: The unordered meals went toward feeding homeless neighbors, which was part of his mission in starting the business. “At one point in my life, I was homeless,” he said. “Having a wife who supports my dreams, and being able to cook the food the way I want in my home — yeah it’s a great feeling.”
But in late September, the couple decided to pause their MEHKO and regroup. While this first crack at the business did deplete their savings a bit, there was a bright side there too: The outdoor furniture they had bought came in handy for celebrating Cedric McCoy’s 50th birthday.
“I’m glad we learned about it this way, versus going into a restaurant,” Anderson McCoy said. “That would have been devastating.”
The future of the home restaurant industry
That sort of dynamism and experimentation is what the people behind the MEHKO program say it was intended to encourage.
“MEHKO is meant to be a steppingstone,” said Roya Bagheri, executive director of the COOK Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group that helped craft the program. Bagheri began her career as a pro bono lawyer for low-income entrepreneurs; many of her clients were immigrant women illegally selling food out of their homes.
She sees the MEHKO program as a way to bring people into the formal economy.
It once seemed possible the law might pave the way for a disruptive app like Uber or Airbnb, but for the home kitchen instead of the personal car or spare room. Akshay Prabhu, who became an advocate for home restaurants after his was shut down over a lack of a permit, built an app called Foodnome designed to connect new MEHKOs to curious diners. In the early days of the pandemic, business skyrocketed. But as the pandemic waned, both diners and cooks dropped off again.
“It’s not the gig-economy model, where you can clock in and clock out,” Prabhu said. “This is a lifetime battle that doesn’t operate at the speed of venture capital.”
This year, Prabhu handed Foodnome off to the COOK Alliance. Rebranded as COOK Connect, the platform will become part of the nonprofit’s mission to train and support anyone who wants to start a MEHKO.
Now that the program has a track record of successes, it’s spreading across California, including to San Diego, Santa Barbara and Alameda counties. The state law allowed each county to adopt MEHKO at its own discretion. But starting in November, the program will have its biggest chance at mainstream pickup in Los Angeles County — which Bagheri called MEHKO’s “white whale.”
Countless semi-underground restaurants are already run out of homes and backyards in Los Angeles County. The area’s density, not to mention its expense, might prompt a MEHKO boom. And a recent change to the MEHKO law may extend the program’s reach — home kitchens will be able to serve as commissaries for food carts.
Street vending has been legal in Los Angeles County since 2018, but the health department’s requirements for licenses for food carts are so strict that very few vendors have been able to obtain one. One major barrier was the requirement that all food be prepared in a commercial kitchen, an expense few people who sell tamales or hot dogs on the street can afford.
“MEHKO tries to create a pathway,” said Holly Mitchell, the Los Angeles County supervisor who led the program’s adoption in the county. “How do we help small and micro enterprise businesses transition into the permitting process? We had to look at what some of the barriers were.”
In Riverside County, MEHKO is still serving its primary purpose: a quick and low-cost means of learning the ropes. But it may be well-suited for a disconnected era when many lack the time to cook, especially in sprawling Southern California.
The “micro” part of the micro-enterprises creates an intimacy hard to find even in a mom-and-pop restaurant. MEHKO owners described serving as five-minute therapists during pandemic pickups. Some said they kept their business going to feed a tight, dedicated crew of regulars who include their own neighbors.
Running a home restaurant brought Cedric McCoy, of Thee Real McCoy Experience, back to his childhood in Miami. There, he said, it was common for a whole neighborhood to converge at the home of a local cook who was selling plates. But in Moreno Valley, he didn’t know his neighbors.
“For the short period of time we were running our MEHKO, we had neighbors that came over who I would know from seeing them, but they actually shared their stories with me, and told me about foods they liked,” McCoy said. “It’s more of an intimate feeling.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2024 The New York Times Company