LA’s home restaurants get their own Restaurant Week

Love restaurant weeks? Now there’s one with a twist — the first LA MEHKO Week, where you can support home cooks across L.A. County who take part in California's Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations program, or MEHKO.

From banana matcha lattes to palak paneer, passionate chefs will offer specials and discounts between Nov. 9 to 15, making everything from scratch in their own licensed kitchens.

Some serve dine-in meals and others offer pickup or delivery. Some operate a few days a week, while others open only a few times a month.

A promotional poster for the first LA MEHKO Week, Nov. 9–15.

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Courtesy COOK Alliance

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Why a MEHKO Week

The biggest challenge many MEHKOs face is marketing. Program rules bar them from putting up signs outside their home.

“They don’t have signs — people don’t just walk by,” said Roya Bagheri, executive director of the COOK Alliance, which promotes the program. She said many L.A. residents still don’t know what a MEHKO is.

In a statewide survey by COOK Alliance, 79% of MEHKO operators said finding customers was their biggest challenge, more than permit costs and taxes.

That’s why the alliance, along with Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell’s office, the L.A. County Department of Public Health and the Department of Economic Opportunity came up with the idea of a restaurant week, to mark two years of the program's existence.

From Nov. 9 to 15, more than 70 MEHKOs, from Lancaster to Lomita, will be open for at least two days and offer a special item or discount. You can find out what's on offer near you on an interactive map you can find at mehkoweek.com.

The online LA MEHKO Week map shows participating home kitchens from the Antelope Valley to the South Bay. Diners can filter by cuisine, category, and dine-in, takeout, or delivery.

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Courtesy COOK Alliance

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Wendy Farajpour, founder of Vida Kitchen in Lomita, serves food that draws on her Guatemalan and Nicaraguan heritage as well as Middle Eastern flavors, and most of her customers find her on social media. Out of respect for her neighbors, she doesn’t publish her address and takes reservations only.

She said she’s taking part in LA MEHKO Week because she hopes to help more people discover MEHKOs. “I want to raise awareness,” she said. “And pay it forward.”

Ashley Childs and her husband, James Schroeder, run Take N’ Taste as a delivery-only MEHKO based in Burbank.

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Courtesy Take N’ Taste

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Courtesy Take N’ Taste

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Ashley Childs, owner and head chef of Take N’ Taste in Burbank, which offers a range of sandwiches, said: “There might be a bit of a stigma about ordering food from a home business, especially if they don’t know you.” Childs and her husband walk into local businesses weekly with a lunch menu to spread the word.

What's on offer

At Vida Kitchen, Farajpour hosts prix fixe dinners in her backyard garden. For MEHKO Week, she’s offering a three-course meal of heart of palm ceviche, Turkish-style dolmades and cardamom tres leches cake on Nov. 13 and 14, for dine-in or, that week only, takeout.

Take N’ Taste is the opposite: delivery only. To keep their address private, Childs and her husband, their only delivery driver, deliver sandwiches in Burbank and Toluca Lake. “It’s almost like we’re a ghost kitchen,” she said. During MEHKO Week, they’re waiving the $5 delivery fee.

Childs, a restaurant industry veteran, said the lower overhead lets her source local, organic ingredients, something that would be difficult in a restaurant setting.

Two years in

Bagheri said L.A. County’s program is the largest of its kind in California. It recently received a Special Merit Award at the county’s 39th annual Productivity and Quality Awards for “Safe, Diverse, and Inclusive Food Economies.”

MEHKO continues to grow in SoCal, with cities such as Long Beach and Vernon each running their own health departments that oversee the program. Long Beach launched its program this fall and currently has about 33 MEHKOs, according to Bagheri. Pasadena is still weighing one, and “people in Pasadena are still really waiting,” she said.