Café Momentum just picked up a $10,000 grant from the Jacques Pépin Foundation, one of ten organizations nationwide chosen for the foundation’s Summer 2026 round of funding. The Dallas restaurant is the only Texas recipient on the list this time around.
For a restaurant that runs on paid internships for justice-involved teenagers, ten thousand dollars matters, but the bigger story here is who’s writing the check. Jacques Pépin’s name still carries real weight in professional kitchens, and the foundation built in his honor has spent the last seven years putting more than two million dollars behind culinary training programs across the country. Café Momentum joining that list says something about how far the program’s reputation has traveled since it started as a handful of pop-up dinners more than a decade ago.
Chad Houser, who founded Café Momentum and still runs it, has a personal reason this particular grant landed differently than most. Twenty years back, before any of this existed, he cooked a meal for Jacques Pépin. He’s said the moment stuck with him, the way a chef of that stature paid attention to a young cook’s work. Now Pépin’s foundation is paying attention to the kids coming up through Houser’s kitchen instead.
The program itself hasn’t changed shape much, it just keeps getting better funded. Somewhere between 80 and 120 teenagers move through Café Momentum’s Dallas headquarters every year, working paid positions in the restaurant while getting culinary training, schooling, mental health support, and case management that follows them well past their shift. It’s a full-on reentry model built around the idea that a second chance works better with structure behind it, not just a job title.
Along with the money, the foundation is sending over branded aprons for the interns and a group membership that opens up more of Pépin’s training resources to the kitchen. Small stuff next to the grant total, but the kind of detail that tends to matter to teenagers who are just starting to think of themselves as cooks.
Café Momentum has a flagship campus in the works for 2027, part of a bigger move already underway. The restaurant is leaving its longtime home downtown this year for a new campus in the Wilson Historic District near Deep Ellum, a shift Houser has described as the next stage of turning this into something other cities can study and copy. Grants like this one are part of how that gets funded. Until the move, the dining room keeps running at 1520 Elm St. #201 in Dallas, where every check paid still runs straight back into the internship program.
