The menu at Taste Community Restaurant has no prices on it. That is not an oversight. It is the entire idea.
Chef Jeff Williams and his wife Julie opened Taste on December 5, 2017, at 1200 S. Main Street on Fort Worth’s Near Southside — the city’s largest food desert — with a straightforward premise: pay what you can, pay what you want, or pay nothing at all. Nobody is turned away. Nobody is asked to explain themselves. You walk in, you order, you eat, and you leave whatever feels right.
Williams grew up food insecure. His parents skipped meals so he and his sister could eat. That history is not incidental to what he built here — it is the reason it exists. Taste operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, runs on roughly 80 percent volunteer labor, and donates whatever food remains at the end of service to Metro Care Services. It is also, worth saying clearly, a genuinely good restaurant. The food is not charity food. It is made by a trained chef who takes it seriously.
The menu changes seasonally and is built around whatever is freshest. What shows up consistently: a Thai-influenced chicken soup — poached chicken breast, green onion, red bell pepper, mushrooms, and garlic, the broth built on fresh ginger, coconut, and lime — that reads lighter and more considered than anything that description usually produces. A turkey mushroom burger with ground turkey blended with mushroom, Gruyère, baby spinach, kale, and pomegranate aioli. A chicken salad sandwich that multiple regulars cite as one of the best in Fort Worth. For dessert, the s’mores — local dark chocolate cake, toasted marshmallow, graham cracker — are better than they need to be. The menu also rotates through items like Korean beef bowls, short rib bao, jollof rice, and red lentil soup depending on the season.
The restaurant is BYOB. No alcohol is served. The room is calm and unhurried and the service is genuine. You sit in a room where the person across from you may have paid $40 for their meal and the person next to you paid nothing, and nobody can tell the difference.
Taste expanded to Arlington at 200 N. Cooper Street in 2024, with twice the capacity of Fort Worth. Both locations run a tuition-free culinary training program certified by the American Culinary Federation, placing graduates in jobs paying an average of $15 an hour. The kitchen is also a classroom.
The Fort Worth location is open Tuesday through Friday 9am to 2pm, Saturday and Sunday 9am to 2pm. Closed Mondays. Phone is (817) 759-9045. Reservations recommended. More at tasteproject.org.
The menu has no prices. Bring what you can.
