Companies That Does Scratch Cooking for Schools in the Bay Area

The Bay Area's legal home restaurants are on the rise. Here are 10 new ones

More people are seizing the chance to be part of the wave of legal home restaurants in the Bay Area. Here are 10 new home food businesses, serving everything from Filipino grilled pork belly to Peruvian chicken stew.

Across the Bay Area, former teachers, line cooks and accountants are now selling tender Peruvian rotisserie chicken, saucy vegan tortas and crispy kimchi pancakes out of their homes — legally.

Alameda, San Mateo, Solano counties and the city of Berkeley legalized home-based restaurants under the state's Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations (MEHKO) act this year, a major victory for informal food businesses that have long operated in a legal gray area.

People are seizing the chance to be part of this new wave of home restaurants. In Alameda County, there are now 23 permitted home kitchens and 11 in San Mateo County. Berkeley has just one so far, run by the founder of home cooking platform Foodnome.

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Head to Buddha's Joy for handmade Chinese green onion pancakes and roti. Michael Chan sold both for six years from a San Bruno bakery of the same name, but closed last year as sales plummeted during the pandemic.

Instead of paying costly Bay Area rent and working long hours at the bakery, he now works from home and sets his own hours. For the first time, he's hired a part-time employee.

The roti, the flaky bread, is Chan's mother's recipe and it's what inspired him to start his food business years ago.

Teena Arora of Curry Sutra has been offering cooking classes on the Peninsula for years and recently started selling a line of homemade spice blends and sugars. But with her new MEHKO permit, she plans to sell hot food out of her San Carlos home. Arora will primarily serve Indian dishes like chana masala and aloo gobi, but will also make pastas, tacos and vegan fare. She hopes to open in a week or so. As a single mother, the extra income — and the potential of expanding into a commissary kitchen in the future if she's successful — is incredibly helpful, she said.

Arora grew up in the food industry. Her parents, Indian immigrants, ran restaurants in the Midwest for years, inspiring her to start her own culinary career.

Filipino and Guamanian standby dishes are on the menu at Hellaxbomb like chicken inasal, a juicy, grilled chicken marinated in lemongrass and galangal. There's also chicken kelaguen, a citrusy, spicy shredded chicken dish topped with grated coconut and liempo, caramelized pork belly. It's all served alongside a Filipino-inspired vinegar dipping sauce.

Crystle Gonzales and her husband, Ronald, have been selling Filipino and Guamanian food informally on and off since 2019. Earlier this year, they started working with home- cooking platform shef.com. But obtaining a MEHKO permit means they won't have to pack up all their ingredients, find child care for their young daughter and drive to Shef's commercial kitchen in San Francisco. They'll be able to cook more regularly, "provide food for our community and also bring income to our household," Gonzales said.

They're waiting on Daly City to sign off on a final permit to open their home restaurant.

Maila Isla serves the food of where its co-owners grew up: Guam and the Philippines. There's pork adobo with Chamorro red rice (which gets its color from achiote spice), lumpia and spicy chicken empanadas.

Darlynn Aquino, who hails from Guam, and her husband, Perfecto, who's Filipino, have been cooking since a young age, Aquino said. She hopes to open her own restaurant one day — if not in Pleasanton, then on Guam.

Hayward

Mother and Daughter Kitchen

Hayward's Mother and Daughter Kitchen specializes in Korean food, from tofu bibimbap to bossam, the steamed pork belly dish served with rice and ample banchan. Plus, four kinds of kimbap, the sushi-like rice rolls, stuffed with vegetables, beef, pork belly or fishcakes marinated in soy sauce.

Owner Jenny Hong comes from a line of restaurant women: Her grandmother ran a restaurant in Korea and her mother is behind Daol Tofu & Korean BBQ in Temescal. The recipes she's making have been passed down through generations.

Pimpin' Chkn is one of the few local home restaurants serving people in person. Every Friday, Elijah Brown opens up his loft to serve fried chicken alongside DJs and karaoke.

His buttermilk-brined and doubled-dredged chicken comes with sides like deep-fried pickles, cole slaw or kale Caesar salad. Or get a fried chicken sandwich on brioche buns he bakes himself. Future dishes might include chicken pot pie or chicken and biscuits.

Brown worked his way through San Francisco restaurants before moving into cooking jobs in the tech world, most recently at a ghost kitchen. He started selling fried chicken on an Oakland street corner after losing his job during the coronavirus shutdown. This grew into pop-ups, a stand at the Grand Lake Farmers Market in Oakland and now, the home restaurant.

Nourishing soups in flavors like cauliflower-turmeric and spiced kabocha squash are the focus at Purpose & Hope in Oakland. Nancy Chang makes nutrient-rich soups primarily for people who are struggling with illnesses, from cancer and diabetes to digestive issues.

She draws on local ingredients for her soups, such as kombu seaweed harvested on the Sonoma coast and mushrooms from organic purveyor Far West Fungi. Every soup can also be made vegan with a vegetable stock.

Chang's business was inspired by watching her mother, who died from cancer, struggle to find food that was easy to digest and healthy. She wanted to make something more appetizing than Ensure nutritional shakes or lackluster hospital food that her mother was forced to turn to.

Chang was selling soups before MEHKO's passage, but she didn't market them widely for the fear of being shut down, which did happen to some pop-ups in the East Bay.

"When you're underground and you're not really aboveboard, you're subject to fines," she said. "MEHKO getting passed was such a turning point for me."

Armando Cervantez recently started selling spiced-rubbed Peruvian rotisserie chicken, estofado de pollo (chicken stew) and fresh salsas in Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood. He marinates the chicken in a mix of Peruvian and Mexican chiles, a combination born from his Peruvian grandmother's improvisation. When she came to the United States from Peru, Mexican chiles were more widely available, he said.

Cervantez serves the tender, whole chicken with aji verde, a chimichurri-like herb sauce that's also creamy, thanks to cotija cheese. His chicken stew — featuring aji amarillo, aji blanca (Peruvian peppers), peas, tomatoes and potatoes — comes with a crisp onion salsa and telera rolls for dipping.

A former Trader Joe's employee, Cervantez got his start selling burritos informally to co-workers and working as a sous-chef at Magnolia Mini Mart in Oakland. His long-term dream is to open a string of Peruvian rotisserie chicken fast-food restaurants.

When Tister's Table opens this month, it will serve Filipino-Salvadoran rice pupusas, a product of owner Jessica Fyles' upbringing in San Francisco. She's half Filipino but grew up eating pupusas in the Mission with a Salvadoran family friend. During quarantine last year, Fyles started making pupusas out of masa studded with lots of fried garlic (channeling the flavor of garlic fried rice) and stuffing them with Filipino ingredients like pork sisig, adobo and longanisa sausage. Instead of curtido, the classic punchy cabbage dish that accompanies pupusas, she mixed cabbage with green papaya, jicama and other ingredients for a tangy, fresh take inspired by atsara, or Filipino pickles.

To Fyles, a former special-education teacher and school administrator, Tister's Table is a way to honor history and evolving culinary traditions. She calls it "mixedness on a plate," adding that "there's this beauty in different cultures and experiences coming together and the innovation that comes from that."

Danielle Andrea is making everything from scratch at Vegan Chula, down to the plant-based cheese filling for her fried jalapeño poppers. Dishes here are inspired by Andrea's Mexican heritage, but veganized. She makes crispy chicharrones out of tofu and mini tortas stuffed with grilled hibiscus flowers and shiitake "bacon." For dessert, she came up with a hybrid concha-cream puff filled with horchata or dulce de leche cream. All of her dishes are smaller and geared toward sharing.

A culinary school graduate, Andrea previously worked at a vegan meats company and a vegan restaurant in New York City. After moving back to the Bay Area, she was contemplating starting a vegan pop-up when she heard about the home restaurant permits. It was a "saving grace," she said, to be able to start a restaurant at a smaller scale with low overhead.

"With what I was making as a chef in New York and then with the pandemic hitting, I didn't have the funds," she said. "This was just such a godsend for me."

Credits

Photos provided by restaurants + The Chronicle staff

Companies That Does Scratch Cooking for Schools in the Bay Area

Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/mehko-bay-area-guide/

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