In 2025, chef Chad Houser, founder and CEO of Café Momentum, was driving in his home city of Dallas when he received a call that made it difficult to focus on the road. On the other end was Dawn Padmore, vice president of awards at the James Beard Foundation, who told Houser he’d received the organization’s Humanitarian of the Year Award. “I just started bawling,” Houser says. “The tears kept flowing for a good five, six months.”
The honor recognized Houser’s years-long commitment to a unique vision: a nonprofit restaurant that offers 12-month paid internships and holistic support to formerly incarcerated teens aged 15 to 19. At Café Momentum, interns gain hands-on culinary experience by working at every station in the restaurant, from front to back of house, and the organization provides them with case managers and a comprehensive list of resources, including academic support, mental health services, parenting classes, and job-attainment planning.
In Texas, the one-year juvenile rearrest rate is roughly 50%; for Café Momentum interns, that number drops to 15%. Despite this figure, Houser challenges the idea that a tidy statistic can sum up the program’s potential for impact. “For some of our kids, the fact that they keep showing up and are beginning to trust us is so monumentally significant,” he says.
The origin of Café Momentum traces back to 2008, when Houser, then a co-owner of the bistro Parigi, volunteered to teach eight young men at the Dallas County Juvenile Department how to make ice cream. The experiences he had and relationships he built while volunteering made him want to do more: “What can I do to build a space that provides consistency and stability for kids in the ways they're asking for?” he wondered.
In 2011, Houser held a pop-up dinner where formerly incarcerated young people worked alongside chefs to prepare food and serve guests. One dinner turned into 40, and in 2015, he founded Café Momentum. Today, the nonprofit restaurant has locations in Dallas, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh, with a Denver location set to launch in 2026. In 2027, the organization will open a two-story, 11,000-square-foot training center in Dallas with the help of $10 million in private funding.
Houser emphasizes that the quality of food and service is essential to the ongoing success of Café Momentum’s program, which more than 1,700 teenagers have completed to date. “It becomes the first message we send to anyone who walks through the doors of the restaurant,” he says. “Our kids can and will rise to whatever level of expectation is set for them, as long as we're investing in the tools, resources, and opportunities for them to do so.”
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