PANORAMA CITY : College Finds Site for Vendors’ Kitchen

Mission College officials have found a site for a community kitchen in Panorama City that they hope to use as a place where sidewalk vendors can cook and sell their food legally.

College officials plan to lease an existing restaurant on Lanark Avenue, near residents of Blythe Street who prepare and sell corn and other food for a living, officials said Tuesday.

“This place is such an ideal spot,” said Penny Young, director of the college’s business and professional center. “We don’t have to do anything to upgrade for health or commercial reasons. It makes us feel all relieved.”

College officials have been looking for such a community kitchen since last summer, when they began teaching a class for about 40 vendors on how to properly prepare food and start a business. The classes, funded by a $250,000 grant from the city of Los Angeles, have been held in a Blythe Street apartment community room in the meantime.

Young hopes the college can begin conducting classes in the new location by January and acquire the proper health and business permits to begin selling food there by spring, 1994.

The vendors will be able to prepare their food there and sell it in the small seating area in the front of the property, she said.

The decision to lease the restaurant follows the Los Angeles City Council’s approval last week of a two-year pilot project to license and regulate sidewalk vendors in eight commercial districts yet to be determined.

Vendors who live on Blythe Street have been visited three times since July by county health inspectors who have confiscated equipment used to cook corn and make ice-cream, and who issued several citations for cooking in unsanitary conditions.