In 2008, Chad Houser was co-owner of Parigi on Maple Avenue and had just been nominated as Dallas’s best up-and-coming chef. He had sold his house to buy into the restaurant, watched the economy collapse the same year, and grew the business 38 percent anyway. Then someone asked if he’d be willing to drive to a juvenile detention facility and teach eight incarcerated young men how to make ice cream.
He went. He taught the class. He drove home. By the time he got there, he already knew what he was going to do with the rest of his career. “I’m going to open a restaurant and let these kids run it,” he told his business partner that night, on the phone, after a few bourbons. She said, “That’s cool.” And that was that.
CraveDFW was around for the early days. The first pop-up dinners started in spring 2011 — Houser would take over a Dallas restaurant on a Sunday night when it was closed, bring in young men coming out of the Dallas County juvenile system, and have them cook and serve a four-course meal to paying guests. The first tickets went for $50. He and a friend posted the link on their personal Facebook pages, hoping to sell 50 seats. Within 24 hours they had accidentally sold 68. Every person who left that first dinner shook Houser’s hand or hugged him and said some version of “this could be my son.” He knew then it was going to work.
By December the tickets had doubled to $100 and sold out in 15 minutes. By spring of 2012, in 15 seconds. The dinners moved around Dallas — Dee Lincoln’s on Cedar Springs, Bolsa Mercado in Oak Cliff, Milestone Culinary Arts on McKinney. Great chefs volunteered their kitchens on their nights off: Brian Luscher, Tim Byres, Michael Ehlert, Janice Provost. We covered every one of them. The room would fill with people who came for dinner and left having their minds changed about who these young men were.
Chad came on CraveRadio in 2013. He had traded his chef coat for a suit and become Cafe Momentum’s first executive director, which anyone who knew him found both moving and slightly funny. He talked plainly about what he’d seen inside those facilities — a system that was, in his words, designed to fail the kids inside it. The recidivism rate in Texas was running near 50 percent. He had a different number in mind.
In January 2015, Café Momentum opened as a permanent restaurant at 1510 Pacific Avenue downtown, staffed by its first class of interns. The model was straightforward: a 12-month paid internship for formerly incarcerated young people between 15 and 19, rotating through every station in the restaurant — dishwasher to prep cook to line cook to server to host. Alongside the culinary training came case managers, mental health services, academic support, parenting classes, help finding housing, and someone to call when things went sideways. The name said what it meant: momentum, as in, you’re not going back.
The recidivism rate among Cafe Momentum interns came in at 15.2 percent. Texas as a whole was still sitting at 48.3. That gap is the whole argument.
CNN named Houser a CNN Hero in 2018. In 2019, the organization opened a Community Services Center in Dallas — a physical space outside the restaurant where interns could access housing help, life skills classes, and the kinds of support that years of listening to teenagers had taught Houser they actually needed. That same year he took the program to the NFL Draft in Nashville and to the Super Bowl in Miami, bringing Dallas interns to cook at events full of policymakers and donors who had never heard of Cafe Momentum. They came for the food. They left writing checks and making calls.
Cafe Momentum Pittsburgh opened in March 2023. Atlanta followed. In 2025, the James Beard Foundation named Houser its Humanitarian of the Year. He was driving in Dallas when the call came. “I just started bawling,” he said. “The tears kept flowing for a good five, six months.” TIME put him on its inaugural Visionaries list this year. Denver is coming in 2026. A two-story, 11,000-square-foot national training center is under construction in Dallas’s Wilson Historic District, funded by $10 million in private investment, opening in 2027.
More than 1,700 young people have come through the program since the doors opened. Lucci — Lucciano — started his internship in 2022 with an incomplete ninth-grade education and earned his GED as valedictorian while working in the kitchen. He’s now a brand ambassador who helped open Atlanta and Denver. “I told Chad I needed the opportunity and promised I’d make the best of it,” he said. “It’s been foot to the pedal since then.”
The next chapter is already under construction. Café Momentum broke ground in January 2025 on a two-story, 11,000-square-foot flagship at 1000 Oak Street in the Wilson Historic District in Old East Dallas — a $10 million privately funded building on land donated by the Meadows Foundation, which sits at the center of a campus hosting 33 nonprofits. The structure is being built by Gordon Highlander and is scheduled to open in January 2027.
For the first time, the restaurant, the Community Services Center, the classrooms, the training kitchen, and the case management offices will all be under one roof — designed from the ground up around how young people learn rather than retrofitted into spaces that were never built with that in mind. The menu stays seasonally driven, a Wednesday dinner service may be added, and the building will have a patio. It will also serve as a national hub — a place where educators, policymakers, and other cities can come and study the model up close.
Café Momentum has already proven that what it built in Dallas can work in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Denver. The flagship is where it teaches everyone else how to do it.
An ice cream lesson in a juvenile detention facility started all of it. Dinner is served Thursday through Saturday, 5:30 to 9 p.m., 1510 Pacific Avenue, downtown Dallas. cafemomentum.org. (214) 303-1234.
