Spend a Very Cheesy New Year’s Eve with Homeroom

Christmas trees. Latkes. Twinkly lights. Jingle bells. There are a lot of romantic images swirling around the holiday season. What all the chipper songs don’t mention are the two things that are more prevalent than reindeer—misguided holiday gifts and expensive, overblown New Years parties.  We’re here to change that.

The best New Year’s parties in our memories were low-key affairs—ordering pizza, dancing in the living room with friends, or having an all-night movie marathon.

So as an alternative to all the fancy and expensive New Year’s parties, we’re throwing one of our own in true Homeroom style—a beer and mac pairing, followed by tunes and drinks until midnight. We’ll have an early seating for all the families out there that don’t usually get to go out for New Year’s Eve, and a late seating for everyone else.

Tickets are $30 for the late seating and $25 for the early seating, and include samplers of three macs, paired with three different beers or wines. The family seating is from 6pm-8pm, (kids will get sepcial goody bags instead of beer or wine), and the grown-up seating starts at 9pm and includes killer tunes a champagne toast at midnight.
Buy your tickets online here:

Early Seating (6pm): http://earlycheesynewyears.eventbrite.com

Late Seating (9pm): http://cheesynewyear.eventbrite.com

As for holiday gifts—I think we can all agree that we’re over lame cableknit sweaters.  Instead, give the gift of mac and cheese. We’ve got gift certificates, t-shirts, and mugs for Homeroom fans.  We can even mail your gift certificate if you don’t have time to come in—we’ll take your order over the phone and mail it out the next day to yourself or directly to your loved one.

And lastly, how great would it be to have mac and cheese platters at your office holiday party? We’ll deliver any platter order over $200, so you can have hot, creamy mac and cheese whenever the party starts. We’re also taking platter orders for Hanukkah and Christmas – and asking anyone who ordered a platter for Thanksgiving– they’re pretty awesome. You can find pricing and details on our platter page: homeroom510.com/catering

As a small Oakland business, we want to say thank you for all your support this holiday season—we’re lucky to be a part of such an amazing community.  We look forward to ringing in the New Year with you!

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Pies, Platters and Winter Macs

It’s almost here.

That one day of the year, when all you have to do is eat. When everyone sits around a big table with plates full of juicy turkey, salty stuffing, sweet potatoes with marshmallow and loads of gravy to top it off (or if you’re like Allison and Erin, you substutite a big fat pork roast for the turkey. Is that wrong?)

Bryan and Mike show off their new mac creation

As you can probably tell, we are gigantic fans of Thanksgiving–and frankly, of eating in general. Which is why, now that we own a restaurant, we wanted to find a way for homeroom to make Thanksgiving even tastier. So we started playing around with portion sizes, new mac recipes and some new desserts using winter fruits. We came up with some pretty delicious ideas, both for Thanksgiving, and to add to our winter menu. We also may have had too good of a time playing around in the kitchen all day – we all went home in a slight lactose coma from the pounds of cheese we consumed.

Erin, Allison and Megan play around with new ingredients

Anyway, here’s what we’ve got for Thanksgiving: big platters of mac, any mac, to serve as a hot, gooey side dish (and lets be honest, the sides always outshine the turkey anyway). Our platters serve ten as a side, or 5 as a main course. We give a 20% discount on orders of 2 platters or more, so if you have a large family, you’re in luck. You can find out more about our platters on our catering page.

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Homeroom gears up for Eat Real 2011

Exactly a year ago we found ourselves frazzled, exhausted, and elbow deep in grated cheese.

Homeroom at Eat Real 2010 photo credit: ©Dan Jung 2010

We were preparing for our first huge mobile food event, the Eat Real Festival, using our meager home equipment and a posse of our dedicated friends to grate 400 pounds of cheese and boil hundreds of pounds of pasta. First Allison’s food processor broke. Then Erin’s. In the wee hours leading up to the festival we began grating cheese by hand on our home box graters. Testing our wills, upper arm strength, and the devotion of our friends and family, we vowed we would never
do an event like it again. Yet here we are—going to Eat Real again in two weeks.
A lot of people don’t know that Homeroom got its start at mobile food events. While we were building out the restaurant, we would dish up mac and cheese to enthusiastic lines at the SF and Oakland Underground Markets, the Pop Up General
Store, and the Eat Real Festival. We wanted people to enjoy our food and get them excited about the restaurant. We really enjoyed these events, but with all the logistics involved in bringing food to the masses, we thought that when Homeroom
opened that we’d prefer to bring the masses to the food. We never anticipated that we’d do mobile food events ever again.

Co-Owner Erin Wade at Eat Real 2010. Photo Credit Dan Jung

A few months ago, our friends at the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen told us that the Outside Lands Music Festival was looking for additional food vendors, and they thought we’d be a good fit. Although we knew the kind of madness that would be involved, realized that we’d make no money due to the percentage of earnings that the Festival keeps, and were already severely overworked and sleep-deprived, we decided to do it anyway.

Co-Owner Allison Arevalo at Outside Lands in San Francisco

We love owning a restaurant, but something that remains unique to the increasingly popular mobile food movement is the kind of direct involvement you have with people at a special time and place. At the restaurant, we can’t be the cook, cashier, and server all at once. But at a mobile food event, that’s exactly what you are. You get to cook the food, look the person in the eye that you’ve made it for, and watch their expression as they take the first bite. At Outside Lands we were high off the excitement in the air and the fabulous music constantly blaring from the main stage. We were particularly giddy when the promoters from Arcade Fire came by specifically to pick up our mac for the band.
And we made it through 800 pounds of cheese without breaking our grater. Currently, we’re gearing up for the Eat Real Festival, where thousands of folks will come out to celebrate local and sustainable food.  There will be food trucks and diy demonstrations galore, and we hope we’ll be able to sneak away for a few minutes to take it all in.
We’re excited that instead of abandoning our roots in the mobile food movement, we’re able to retain them and be parts of special events and communities outside the restaurant. We hope that you’ll come to visit us at Eat Real, or tell us
about events that you’d like to see Homeroom at in the future.
If you saw us at Outside Lands or any of our previous mobile food events, please leave a comment and say hi!
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School’s Out, Homeroom’s In!

Hey classmates, it’s official – summer is here. And even though school’s out, it’s the best time of year to be in homeroom.

Why, you ask? Because we have lots of new tasty stuff on the menu that is perfect for the sultry weather sweeping through the Bay Area.

When we first said we were opening a mac and cheese restaurant, a lot of people said that mac and cheese wouldn’t provide enough variation to sustain a restaurant. Well, they were wrong.

Now that it’s summer, and all the great summer produce is in season, we actually have to limit ourselves from putting all the ideas we have on the menu. We love coming up with recipes that fit what’s most delicious each season, and we recently introduced our first seasonal mac–the summer basil mac!
It’s our only cold mac option, made with homemade pesto, fresh green beans, and topped with salty pecorino cheese. The deep flavors of the crushed basil and garlic remind us of summer picnics growing up, which is why we wanted to add it to the menu now that temperatures are finally rising.  The summer basil mac is even better with a pint of Pranqster Belgian Ale from North Coast Brewery, and when you eat it outside under our new umbrellas.
Also on the summer menu is a crisp green bean salad as our new veggie side, and a fresh strawberry crisp with whipped cream as our seasonal dessert. And, look for our off-menu strawberry shake, it’s seriously delicious.
We also have New Orleans-style iced coffee from Blue Bottle, big hearty salads, BLTs with homemade ranch dressing for lunch, egg sandwiches with buttermilk biscuits and mimosas for brunch, and of course, all ten of our creamy mac and cheeses (speaking of which – have you tried the Gilroy mac yet? It was last month’s addition, and has roasted garlic, buttery gouda and sharp pecorino, and is best with sauteed mushrooms and breadcrumbs).
Also new for summer are platters of mac and cheese. We thought you might like to bring some mac to a BBQ, office party or your friend’s house. We’ll give you 20% off when you order a platter instead of individual portions (it’s just gotta be enough for at least ten people).

That’s about all for now.  Every week seems to bring better weather and new summer treats–definitely follow us on Facebook or Twitter if you want to keep up with them all.  Hope to see you all in homeroom sometime soon, and if there’s a summer treat you’d like to see on our menu, let us know! We’d love to hear from  you . . .

-Allison and Erin

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You asked for it!

Megan Gordon, always smiling over a pot of mac and cheese.

Megan Gordon, always smiling over a pot of mac and cheese.

We get lots of emails. And phone calls, facebook messages, tweets and even letters. You’ve got questions – that much is clear – and we want to give you answers. So here we go. Responses to your most frequently asked questions. If we’ve missed something, leave a comment and let us know! We’d hate to leave you hanging…

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Now that we’re open…

Daniel takes out a tray full of macs to hungry patrons.

Well folks, we did it.

A year after quitting our corporate jobs to follow our dream and open a restaurant – an exhausting year filled with planning, building, recipe-testing and wondering, “Are we crazy to leave our cushy desk jobs to open a mac and cheese restaurant?” We did it. And now, after six weeks of business, our greatest success has simultaneously been our biggest dilemma: we’re slammed!

We find ourselves sleeping very little these days, and having a never-ending list of things we want to do with not enough time to do them (this includes answering all of your emails, so forgive us for not responding in a timely manner). The amazing thing is, despite the 100 hour workweeks and grueling days on our feet, we couldn’t
be happier, and find ourselves missing the restaurant in the few moments we aren’t there.

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Homeroom gears up for opening day!

It’s here.

That’s right, the time when you stop reading about our mac and cheese and actually come in and eat it.  After an exhilarating and exhausting year of fundraising, construction, recipe-testing, food events, legal hurdles, and good old-fashioned elbow grease, Homeroom is finally ready to open.

We feel bad that we’ve been so delinquent about posting recently, but it’s been an insanely busy few months.  Because we want Homeroom to have our own personal touch (and because we’re broke), we made all the tables, hand-painted the chairs, crafted shelves, built the bar, made our sign—we even created our own funky chandeliers.  As a result, it’s taken a bit more time than we had hoped, but the restaurant is also looking even better than we had ever dreamed.

We’re here all day, every day, prepping to open our doors.  It’s incredibly exhausting, but every evening we take a step back, look around, and feel incredibly lucky to have built something so incredible.  With wall-to-wall windows, the restaurant always feels airy and bright, and it’s fun to sit at the community table and watch neighbors walk by and poke their heads in with excitement.   It’s great to see people’s faces light up when they see our huge succulent wall, old-school card catalogue, or chalkboard map of California.  It’s even greater to see their faces light up when they hear about our macaroni and cheese, or taste a cookie from our new oven.

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