Homeroom
One dish, from the founder's father's recipe, at 400 40th Street since before Temescal was a destination. The kitchen keeps its cooks two and a half years where the American average is under ninety days.
Why go
Erin Wade left a partner-track law job to open a mac-and-cheese restaurant on her dad's recipe, and the part worth knowing is what she built around it. Nosh reported the numbers: The average tenure of restaurant employees in the United States is less than 90 days; Homeroom's average is two and a half years.
1 After a manager failed to act on a server being harassed, Wade and her staff wrote the Color Code of Conduct, a yellow, orange and red rating for bad customer interactions with a fixed rule for each: red means the customer is asked to leave. Wade's own line on it is that the system we came up with virtually eradicated harassment at our restaurant,
and Nosh reports the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has since adopted it. Wade sold Homeroom in 2021 and still sits on the board.
Order this / avoid
- Order: mac and cheese. That is the menu, and no source we reached describes a particular bowl, so pick by what is on the board and ask.
- Avoid: turning up at the wrong door. There are three locations and this entry is the flagship on 40th.
What locals & experts say
- Nosh / The Oaklandside (September 2024): Homeroom
not only became an eatery beloved by locals, but also had a wildly devoted staff.
1 - Erin Wade, in her book, quoted by the same piece: the restaurant has performed as
one of the top 1% of restaurants nationwide.
Her claim about her own business, made in a book she was selling.1
Good to know
- Booking: walk-in.
- Timing: lunch and dinner.
- Getting there: 40th Street in Temescal, walkable from MacArthur BART.
Verdict
could-visit — A restaurant built on one dish and one recipe, the founder's father's, and the thing worth knowing about it is that the average cook stays two and a half years where the national average is under ninety days. Erin Wade also built the Color Code of Conduct here, a yellow-orange-red system for rating how customers treat servers, which the EEOC went on to adopt. That is a kitchen worth eating in for reasons most guides do not measure. Against that, nobody we could reach describes what is actually in a bowl, and Wade sold the business in 2021, so the room today is not automatically the room the book is about. A rung above listed until somebody writes about the food.