A Brief, Frenetic History of Riverside’s MEHKO Revolution, with a Side of Dirty’s Sandwiches: Notes on Home-Cooked Hustle in the Inland Empire

A Brief, Frenetic History of Riverside’s MEHKO Revolution, with a Side of Dirty’s Sandwiches: Notes on Home-Cooked Hustle in the Inland Empire

As told to me by AI David Foster Wallace

Here we are, Riverside, California, 2025, a sprawl of citrus-scented suburbs and strip malls, where the air hums with the promise of reinvention, and the Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation (MEHKO)—a mouthful of a term that sounds like a government acronym designed to bore you into submission—has quietly become a culinary insurgency. This is not just about food, though food is the molten core of it; it’s about people, mostly regular folks, often women, often immigrants, often the kind of people who’ve been told their whole lives to stay in their lane, now slinging plates of tamales or brisket or, in the case of one newcomer, sandwiches that could make you weep, all from the linoleum-tiled sanctuaries of their home kitchens. And in Riverside, the first county in California to fling open its arms to this experiment, the MEHKO movement is less a trend than a middle finger to the idea that good food needs a corporate logo or a brick-and-mortar lease. Let’s unpack this, shall we? And let’s not forget Dirty’s Sandwiches, the newest kid on the block, because nothing says “I’m here” like a Gochujang-honey glazed fried chicken sandwich made in someone’s Orangecrest kitchen.

The MEHKO Genesis: A Legislative Fever Dream

To understand MEHKOs in Riverside, you need to rewind to 2018, when California, in a rare moment of bureaucratic audacity, passed Assembly Bill 626. This wasn’t just a law; it was a gauntlet thrown at the feet of the restaurant industrial complex. AB 626, effective January 1, 2019, created a new category of food facility: the Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation, allowing regular people—your neighbor, your auntie, the guy who’s been perfecting his adobo recipe for decades—to legally sell food from their homes. No need for a $100,000 commercial kitchen. No need to navigate the labyrinth of permits that make opening a restaurant feel like applying for a PhD in red tape. Just a home kitchen, a permit, an inspection, and a dream. You could cook, serve, and sell up to 30 meals a day, 90 a week, with a revenue cap (originally $50,000, now $100,000, adjusted for inflation because, you know, capitalism).

Riverside County, in a move that was either visionary or reckless depending on who you ask, became the first to opt in. By mid-2019, they were issuing permits, and Meghan McConaghy Chane, a stay-at-home mom in Eastvale, became the state’s first MEHKO operator, serving what she called a “healthy twist on classic comfort food.” She didn’t just cook; she was a pioneer, a culinary Magellan, though she canceled her first event because she was sick and didn’t want to spark headlines like “Typhoid Mary 2.0: The MEHKO Menace.” Smart move.

Why Riverside? Maybe it’s the Inland Empire’s underdog spirit, its history of citrus groves and scrappy entrepreneurship. Maybe it’s the fact that Riverside County, with its 2.4 million people and sprawling geography, has always been a place where people hustle to make ends meet. By 2021, over 100 MEHKOs had sprung up, most run by minority and immigrant communities, turning kitchens into micro-economies. Cities like Riverside (17 permits), Moreno Valley (16), and Corona followed suit, with only one reported complaint—a guy smoking meats in Moreno Valley, which, let’s be honest, probably smelled amazing. No foodborne illness outbreaks, no chaos, just people feeding people.

This wasn’t without pushback. Cities and restaurant owners clutched their pearls, fretting about “unfair competition” and “health risks.” Chambers of commerce whispered about sanitation nightmares, as if home cooks were out here serving botulism on a platter. But Riverside’s safety record? Spotless. No outbreaks, no complaints beyond a little smoky BBQ. The naysayers, it turns out, were just yelling into the void.

The MEHKO Ethos: Hustle, Heart, and Home

What’s a MEHKO, really? It’s not just a legal loophole; it’s a vibe. It’s your neighbor who’s been perfecting her pozole for 20 years, now selling it to strangers who found her on a Yelp-style app called Homemade LA (or, in Riverside’s case, word-of-mouth and Instagram reels). It’s the guy who lost his restaurant job in the pandemic and turned his garage into a taco stand. It’s the opposite of the sterile, homogenized chains that dot Riverside’s Magnolia Avenue. MEHKOs are limited—30 meals a day, no third-party delivery like DoorDash (unless the customer’s disabled), no raw oysters or alcohol, and you’ve got to prep, cook, and serve on the same day. Pets and kids? Banned from the kitchen during service. Water from a private well? Get it tested. It’s regulated, but not oppressively so.

The COOK Alliance, a group born from the ashes of a failed tech platform called Josephine, has been the movement’s cheerleader, pushing counties to opt in and helping home cooks navigate the permit process (application, inspection, food safety certification—check, check, check). They argue MEHKOs are about equity, giving low-income folks, women, and people of color a shot at entrepreneurship without needing a bank loan or a trust fund. And they’re not wrong. In Riverside, MEHKOs have been a lifeline for people who might otherwise be slinging food under the table, dodging fines, and praying the health department doesn’t knock.

By 2024, Riverside had issued permits to around 230 MEHKOs, a number that’s likely grown since. The county’s Department of Environmental Health, has been the gatekeeper, ensuring kitchens pass muster without crushing the spirit of the operation. It’s a balancing act: safety without suffocation. And it’s working.

Enter Dirty’s Sandwiches: The New Kid with a Pastrami Problem

And now, the newest player in this culinary circus: Dirty’s Sandwiches, a MEHKO in Orangecrest, Riverside, that’s less a business and more a love letter to the sandwich as an art form. Imagine a kitchen where the air smells of fresh-baked bread and Jamaican-style “wash” (lemonade, but with swagger), where the menu rotates like a DJ’s playlist, offering sandwiches, sides, and desserts that feel like they were made by someone who gets it. Dirty’s isn’t just slinging food; they’re “sharing the fun and flavor of professional kitchens,” which sounds like code for “we’re having a blast and you will too.”

What makes Dirty’s special? It’s not just the sandwiches—though I’d bet my left shoe their fried chicken could make a grown man cry. It’s the context. They’re part of this MEHKO wave, operating under the same rules as everyone else: no more than 90 meals a week, no signage (sorry, no neon “Dirty’s” sign in the front yard), and a commitment to keeping it real. They’re in Orangecrest, a neighborhood that’s more suburban sprawl than foodie haven, which makes their existence feel like a quiet rebellion. You don’t find Dirty’s on Uber Eats; you find them through Instagram, word-of-mouth, or maybe a neighbor who’s like, “Yo, you gotta try this guy’s corn ribs.” It’s personal. It’s direct. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re in on a secret.

The Bigger Picture: Why MEHKOs Matter

MEHKOs like Dirty’s Sandwiches aren’t just about feeding people; they’re about rewriting the rules of who gets to feed people. Riverside’s experiment, now six years strong, has proven that home kitchens can be safe, sustainable, and damn good. It’s not without flaws—permits cost money ($597 for the application, $347 for the annual health permit in LA County, likely similar in Riverside), and not every county has jumped on board. But Riverside’s success has inspired others: Los Angeles County joined in November 2024, and states like Utah are sniffing around the idea.

What’s at stake here? It’s not just sandwiches or tacos or your tía’s lumpia. It’s the democratization of food, the idea that anyone with a stove and a vision can join the game. It’s about giving people who’ve been shut out of the culinary world—by money, by bureaucracy, by systemic barriers—a chance to shine. And in a place like Riverside, where the cost of living keeps climbing and the American Dream feels like a lease you can’t afford, that’s no small thing.

Dirty’s Sandwiches, with their rotating menu and their cleverly simple corn ribs, is just the latest chapter in this story. They’re not the first MEHKO, and they won’t be the last. But they’re proof that Riverside’s gamble is paying off, one home-cooked meal at a time. So go find them. Order a sandwich. Taste the hustle. And maybe, just maybe, start dreaming about what you could cook in your own kitchen.