More than 70 licensed home kitchens across Los Angeles County are throwing open their doors — some literally, some only by appointment — for the first LA MEHKO Week, running Nov. 9 through 15, 2026. It's the first restaurant week built entirely around home cooks operating under California's Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations program, and it lands two years after the county's version of the program got off the ground.
The event, first reported by LAist, kicks off Nov. 7 at the Earvin “Magic” Johnson Rec Area in South LA before the participating kitchens take over for the following week. Locations stretch from Lancaster down to Lomita, giving diners across the county a reason to seek out home-based menus they might otherwise never stumble across. Each participating MEHKO will stay open at least two days during the week and offer some kind of special item or discount.
Wendy Farajpour, who founded Vida Kitchen in Lomita, said she's joining LA MEHKO Week to help more people discover what a MEHKO even is. Her menu draws on her Guatemalan and Nicaraguan heritage alongside Middle Eastern flavors, and during the event she's offering a three-course dinner on Nov. 13 and 14 featuring heart of palm ceviche, Turkish-style dolmades and a cardamom tres leches cake, with both dine-in and takeout available. Farajpour normally takes reservations only and keeps Vida Kitchen's address private out of respect for her neighbors, relying mostly on social media to find customers.
Why So Few People Know Their Neighbor Runs a Restaurant
That anonymity is baked into the rules. State MEHKO regulations bar operators from putting up signs outside their homes, which keeps these businesses largely invisible to anyone not already looking for them. Roya Bagheri, executive director of the COOK Alliance, which helped dream up the restaurant-week concept with Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell's office, the LA County Department of Public Health and the Department of Economic Opportunity, said people simply don't walk past MEHKO homes the way they'd pass a storefront, and most Angelenos don't know what a MEHKO is in the first place.
That visibility problem shows up in the numbers, too. A statewide COOK Alliance survey found that 79% of MEHKO operators named finding customers as their single biggest challenge, a figure consistent with marketing being described as the sector's major hurdle more broadly. LA MEHKO Week's own fix for the problem is an interactive map at mehkoweek.com that lets diners filter listings by cuisine, category, and whether a kitchen offers dine-in, takeout or delivery; many listings share the cook's address only after an order is placed.
Ashley Childs, who owns and is head chef of Take n' Taste in Burbank, runs a delivery-only operation built around a range of sandwiches, delivered personally by Childs and her husband, James Schroeder, around Burbank and Toluca Lake. During LA MEHKO Week, Take n' Taste is waiving its usual $5 delivery fee. Childs and Schroeder also promote the business the old-fashioned way, dropping off lunch menus at local businesses on a weekly basis.
The Stigma — and the Upside — of Cooking Out of Your House
Childs told LAist that some customers carry a stigma about ordering from an unfamiliar home business, a hesitation MEHKO operators across the county are still working to overcome. But she also said the lower overhead of cooking from home lets her source local, organic ingredients that would be difficult to work into a traditional restaurant's margins — a tradeoff that echoes broader research on the program's economic upside.
That research, compiled by the COOK Alliance and the CAMEO Network with independent researchers over the program's first five years statewide, found 73% of operators said their MEHKO helped them financially, and more than a third have used it as a stepping stone to scale into a larger food business. The same report found 79% of MEHKO operators are people of color and roughly 70% are women. Safety data from that research also found 97% of MEHKOs have never faced a single formal complaint of any kind, with only two foodborne illness complaints logged across 898 MEHKOs permitted statewide between 2019 and 2024.
LA County's Program Is the Largest in the State
Bagheri described LA County's MEHKO program as the largest of its kind in California, and the county's effort recently picked up a special merit award in the safe, diverse and inclusive food economies category at the county's 39th annual Productivity and Quality Awards. MEHKOs operate under firm limits regardless of size: the Los Angeles Times reports they can sell no more than 30 meals a day and 90 a week, and must serve only food prepared that same day.
Los Angeles County's Environmental Health Division issues MEHKO permits everywhere except Pasadena, Long Beach and Vernon, which run their own environmental health departments, according to Eater LA. Pasadena is weighing whether to start its own program, per LAist's reporting. The state framework behind all of this traces back to AB 626, which required MEHKOs to be treated as restricted food service facilities while carving out exemptions from rules written for conventional restaurants, according to the bill text on file with the California Legislative Information site.
Long Beach, which runs its own health department alongside Vernon, launched its MEHKO program in fall 2026 and now counts about 33 licensed home kitchens, according to Bagheri. Long Beach became the 19th California jurisdiction to authorize the program, and notably allows renters — not just homeowners — to operate MEHKOs. Applicants there must complete food-safety certification, write up operating procedures, keep detailed food-safety records and pass an initial inspection before opening, with startup expenses totaling roughly $1,400 before serving customers, per Longbeachize's reporting.
LA County's licensing numbers tell a mixed story depending on the source. The Los Angeles Times reports MEHKOs were greenlighted countywide in May 2024 and that more than 400 licenses have been approved since. AFAR, meanwhile, reports that nearly 200 MEHKO licenses have been issued since November 2025. Both figures come from the dossier's sourcing without a clear reconciliation between them.
The LAist story behind this reporting was written by Gab Chabrán. LAist notes it is now 100% community funded after Congress voted in 2025 to defund public media, a move the outlet says eliminated $1.7 million from its annual budget going forward.
