Los Angeles has 25 Michelin-starred restaurants, placing it comfortably within the top 15 fine-dining cities in the world by quantity. But this figure doesn’t come close to showing the depth and breadth of its dining scene. Unlike in other American cities, much of L.A.’s best food doesn’t come in traditional restaurants, let alone fine dining establishments.
Instead, you’ll find unbelievable meals in ugly 1980s stucco strip malls, at food stalls on the sidewalk in front of a 7-Eleven, or out of a truck in a parking lot. And for the past year, a new addition has joined the scene: legal dining and takeout from regular people’s homes.
Starting last year, the thoroughly informal vibe of Los Angeles eating has seen a change thanks to a niche law called AB 1325, which governs restaurants called MEHKOs: Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations. This law has brought some of Los Angeles’s best restaurants out of the shadows. To be more specific, they’re in the sunny backyards of people’s houses.
At Bun Bun Bakery, customers pick up their orders from the garden in a basket lowered directly from the kitchen window.
Photo by Elli Lauren (L); photo by Sofia Draco (R)
MEHKOs are legal food-selling establishments operated out of private homes. Since November 2025, nearly 200 MEHKO licenses have been issued, including a vibey coffee shop in Echo Park, a spot behind a gate in Watts selling musakhan (Palestine’s national dish, a sumac- and caramelized-onion-roasted chicken over taboon flatbread), and a Lakewood backyard where the Peruvian chef fires up lomo saltado in a wok.
Locals often say that the best seafood in a city famed for its beaches is available at Mariscos Osuna in South Central. The founder of one of the city’s hottest pizzerias sells some of L.A.’s best sourdough out of his house in Larchmont at Two Rose. And you can find killer Scandinavian cardamom buns in a cottage at Bun Bun Bakery in Highland Park.
The requirements and restrictions are minimal: proprietors must pay a few hundred dollars for a permit and inspection, and they are restricted to making a maximum of 30 meals per day, 90 per week, and $100,000 in gross annual sales.
Backyard and streetside restaurants have always been a fundamental part of the city’s food culture, even without any sort of permitting.
“This isn’t new to Los Angeles,” says Daniel Navarro, whose East L.A. backyard restaurant Comida del Pueblo sells Sinaloa-style breakfast on weekends. (If he hasn’t sold out, get the machaca, a rehydrated beef floss he has a friend send him from Culiacán.) “There’s always been underground spots, but they needed to be private. If you knew, you knew,” says Navarro.
David Wilcox serves some of the best sourdough pizza from his house, at a MEHKO called Two Rose.
Photo by Pascal Shirley
Backyards and home kitchens have and continue to sell food as informal and unpermitted restaurants, serving some of the best food in the city. “I think Los Angeles—because we’re a lot of immigrants, maybe people who are not under regulations—we sometimes find work selling food,” says Heidi Randolph, originally from Oxapampas, Peru. Randolph’s MEHKO, Lomo Fuego, specializes in variations on the popular lomo saltado, a Chinese/Peruvian fusion dish featuring soy-marinated meat and french fries stir-fried in a wok.
Many of the best and most popular backyard restaurants aren’t listed as MEHKO permitted at all; they blow up on Instagram and TikTok, have articles written about them in local media, and remain at risk of being shut down if a neighbor or landlord complains.
MEHKO allows those businesses to come out of the shadows. “I think in a lot of ways that this is like a food justice movement,” says Roya Bagheri, executive director of the MEHKO advocacy nonprofit COOK Alliance, which maintains a MEHKO map—after all, MEHKOs by law can’t have any outdoor signage.
According to COOK Alliance’s figures, 70 percent of MEHKO operators are women, and 79 percent are people of color. Many work regular nine-to-five jobs during the week and run a backyard restaurant on weekends for extra income and to provide a social hub for the community. “We see a lot of women, parents, people who are staying home, or people with disabilities, who otherwise can’t work a traditional job, be able to use this as a way to support themselves,” says Bagheri.
At Granada coffee shop in Echo Park, the couple who live upstairs have opened their living room and courtyard to the public during weekday mornings for coffee, treats, and co-working.
Photo by Talitha Bullock (L); photo by Oscar Mendoza (R)
“In the beginning I was kind of scared, but I didn’t have any choice, because my husband and I just bought the house, and I had stopped working, so my income was gone,” says Randolph. “You have to be patient. I was almost thinking about closing after last year; we were spending more money than we’re earning.” But the increased attention from social media on the MEHKO program and other backyard eateries led to Lomo Fuego becoming so successful that now, Randolph is up against that maximum income limit and looking to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant.
Backyard restaurants are what makes L.A. dining different from New York, Chicago, or San Francisco. “It’s more welcoming than a restaurant, you know,” says Navarro. “Everyone feels at home.” And what better way to make customers feel at home than to literally bring them into your home?
