Erin Wade is the “Mac & Cheese Millionaire”

There’s nothing like mac and cheese to turn your day around. In the case of Erin Wade, the ultimate comfort food is what turned her career around.

“Food has tremendous power to bring comfort, to bring joy [and] to be delicious,” Wade told the Journal.

The founder of Homeroom, which is a mac and cheese restaurant, Wade is the author of “The Mac and Cheese Cookbook” and the newly-released “The Mac & Cheese Millionaire: Building a Better Business by Thinking Outside the Box.”

An essential read for small business owners, professional women, aspiring entrepreneurs and mac and cheese lovers, “The Mac & Cheese Millionaire” blends business tips and strategies with anecdotes from Wade’s journey.

“My love of macaroni and cheese led me to write the cookbook, but my love of business and of restaurants and creating meaningful work … is really what led me to write “The Mac & Cheese Millionaire,” Wade said. “It’s part memoir, part business book [and] part big food hug.”

Wade, who lives in the Bay Area, has a public policy degree from Princeton and a law degree from UC Berkeley. She was unhappily working as an attorney, when she got the idea to open a restaurant dedicated to mac and cheese.

One night, after a miserable day at work, Wade was craving comfort; she wanted mac and cheese.

“I realized there was no restaurant I could go to that made it as delicious as my dad’s recipe,” she said. “So I went out, bought all the food and made it myself.”

Wade saw an opening in the market.

“There [were] restaurants dedicated to all sorts of things: pizza, ice cream, hamburgers,” she said. “It just felt like a mystery to me why there [were] no restaurants dedicated to mac and cheese.”

Besides, if it was one of her favorite foods, it was likely others felt the same way. She was right!

Over the course of a decade, Wade built Homeroom, from zero employees to 100, and to many millions of dollars a year in sales. When Wade sold the company to a “very successful, much larger company,” she started reflecting on what she learned along the way, which is how the book came about. She had built a career and a company that had meaning, purpose and connection.

“I do think that cooking is really an antidote to a job that’s very much about thinking,” she said. “Thinking is very much in your mind; food … literally engages [all of] your senses… so if you’ve been trapped in your mind, [cooking] is a really great way to get into your body.”

The Homeroom mac and cheese is her dad’s recipe, the one she grew up eating.

“My mom is an Israeli Jew and my dad grew up as an American pig farmer,” Wade said. Her dad ended up converting to Judaism, and Wade was raised with a deep sense of Jewish hospitality, but with American food.

“It was really like, ‘Welcome anyone who comes to the door… even if you don’t know them, feed them right away,’ she said. “It was sort of a funny mix of these two cultural backgrounds that came together; Homeroom is very influenced by that.”

Mac and cheese is a simple dish that anyone can make with ingredients found at the grocery store. The key to making it delicious, Wade said, is to prepare it from scratch and to add more cheese than you thought was humanly possible.

“At Homeroom, the mac and cheese does not sit in like a vat somewhere; every single one is made to order and that’s why it’s delicious,” she said. “We also put a quarter pound of cheese in each portion, so it’s really cheesy.”

When asked how she balances out the indulgence, Wade said her philosophy on personal health is to enjoy everything in moderation.

“It’s not intended to be eaten as daily sustenance, it is intended to be a treat,” she said. “Hopefully, when you look at what you’re eating over weeks and months and years, it looks healthy overall, even if an individual meal might be relatively indulgent.”

Just like finding something you love and following that passion, indulgent food is part of a life well-lived.