Rokeisha Bryant at Riverside Revival
Café Momentum bills itself as “not a normal restaurant” — and that’s because, by design, many of its youth workers have been incarcerated.
One of those people is Cameron Carver. At 15, Carver found himself in lockup after robbing a gas station, which he says he did in hopes of helping pay his family’s electric bill. “My step-dad had passed away and the lights were cut off,” he says, “and my grandma was on oxygen and I panicked.”
His then-probation officer presented him with an opportunity. Café Momentum, a Dallas-based nonprofit restaurant and culinary training facility that started in 2015, was coming to Nashville to host a three-day pop-up during the 2019 NFL Draft. Carver might learn some culinary skills and get to meet some NFL players — turns out, he got both of those things.
That three-day event led Carver to a job at Geist Nashville, which he says changed his life. It also kicked off efforts in earnest to open a brick-and-mortar nonprofit restaurant to help young people like Carver who have been in the juvenile justice system. (Not everyone working at Café Momentum has been incarcerated, but everyone has been directly affected by the criminal justice system in some way.) Café Momentum plans to replicate the model that has been successful in Dallas when it opens in Music City later this year. The team is also looking for a location in Pittsburgh, with goals to open in 10 markets in the next five years and 50 within the next 25.
“Our goal is really to work ourselves out of a job,” says acclaimed Dallas chef Chad Houser. Café Momentum is Houser’s brainchild. In 2007 — the same year he opened his first restaurant after years of working in other kitchens — he taught eight boys in the Dallas County juvenile detention facilities how to make ice cream. That experience changed Houser’s idea of what it means to work in a kitchen. He even did a TEDx talk about it. He sold his restaurant in order to focus on work that looked more like that ice cream class.
Café Momentum’s goal is to help kids ages 15 to 19. Yes, to give them skill sets and jobs, but Houser wanted to address more than that. He wanted to address the long-term hurdles formerly incarcerated young people face, like finding housing, support systems and health care. Café Momentum does this through a 12-month paid internship that teaches them how to cook and run the restaurant. The program also teaches life skills that are necessary outside of the restaurant, and even offers counseling, providing participants with case managers.
Each student rotates through all stations of a restaurant, from back of the house to front of the house, over the course of the year. Each station has a professional overseeing operations and functioning as an instructor. Students are set up for success — a youth server might have three tables in a section, rather than the, say, eight that a professional would juggle. Because of that structure, the restaurant model is not self-sustaining. Foundation funding and donations are essential to the bottom line.
Since opening, Houser’s Café Momentum — which serves fine-dining, dinner-only meals in downtown Dallas — has gotten nods from food critics lauding it alongside Dallas’ top restaurants.
One day in 2018, Nashville Juvenile Court Judge Sheila Calloway ate at Café Momentum. She said to Houser, in what he describes as her famously direct style, “When are you going to put one of these in Nashville?”
So, when the NFL Draft opportunity came about — thanks to interest from former Seattle Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander and the Stand Together Foundation — Houser saw an opportunity to do as Calloway asked, at least as a pop-up. For the event, Houser partnered with Nashville’s Oasis Center, where Rokeisha Bryant had worked in a number of positions for more than a decade.
“We need more pathways for youth in general,” Bryant says. “This project combines all of my skills, talents, strengths and passions.” She helped Houser with the pop-up before returning to work at the Oasis Center.
Fast-forward to July 2021, when — after months of brainstorming and continued conversation — Bryant accepted the role of executive director of Café Momentum Nashville. “I was ecstatic,” she says. “I was really excited to jump on board and roll my sleeves up.”
And she has. Since the summer, Bryant has led a pop-up at Saint Stephen in Germantown and launched a pilot program at Riverside Revival. At the intersection of Porter Road and Riverside Drive in East Nashville, Riverside Revival is a community event campus with a culinary training kitchen, early childhood development center, space for yoga classes from Small World Yoga, and other initiatives. Funded by the Boedecker Foundation, Riverside also hosted a screening of a 41-minute documentary about Café Momentum designed to increase awareness of the program.
The Riverside Revival pilot is a shorter, smaller 10-week program, but it mimics the structure and aims of the yearlong model. In March 2022, the students going through the pilot — which is overseen by chef Ben Tyson of Patchwork — will host a pop-up meal.
The pilot and fundraising continue as Bryant negotiates Café Momentum Nashville’s permanent location. Originally, she had her heart set on North Nashville because of the cycle of poverty, displacement and incarceration that has plagued that part of the city. The ideal location will be around 6,500 square feet, with room for a restaurant as well as a community service center for the nonprofit’s educational programs. The location must be accessible via public transit to both the students who are working in the café and the customers who will eat there. After more research, Bryant expanded the search to Madison, Antioch and other communities.
Though the word “café” may sound casual, the vision is for a fine-dining restaurant. While the Dallas location is open just three nights a week, Houser says Nashville diners are more willing to leave their own neighborhoods to eat out, and that gives a Nashville restaurant the opportunity to be open more often, with a goal of five days a week.
After a year at the restaurant (which includes a two-week training period), graduates can opt to work in jobs with community partners. That’s what you call a win-win, particularly when you consider labor shortages facing the hospitality industry. Students who aren’t interested in food-service jobs are guided into the industries that interest them. Café Momentum works in part, Houser and Bryant say, because all of it is opt-in programming — students themselves enroll in the program and decide what to do next. Bryant is still developing a network of community partners, and the initial list includes many of the city’s hospitality leaders.
In Dallas, Café Momentum sees about 150 kids annually through its internships in cohort groups. Nashville will start off smaller, but hopes to grow to serve a similar number.
The structure of Café Momentum Nashville is not unlike West Nashville’s Café at Thistle Farms, which employs women survivors of trafficking, addiction and prostitution but features a different type of dining experience. Bryant says she often heads to Thistle Farms for inspiration as she works to open the restaurant’s doors. Café Momentum Nashville has applied for 501(c)(3), and it will be a stand-alone organization not directly managed by Café Momentum in Dallas or Momentum Advisory Collective, which is the entity working on the expansion goals. Café Momentum Nashville has its own board of directors.
Folks interested in Café Momentum Nashville’s mission can sign up for online newsletters and follow the organization on Instagram (@cafemomentum.nsh) to learn about upcoming pop-ups, Bryant says. Of course, donations are always welcome.
Carver is now 18 and has seniority in his station at Geist, having worked up from salads to proteins, and he trains workers twice his age. He says he earned almost $40,000 last year and has helped his mother out of her dire financial dire straits. (His grandmother has passed away.) Carver shows his pay stubs to other kids who are struggling as evidence that restaurant jobs are viable career paths.
“If it weren’t for Café Momentum, I would be doing the same things I was doing before,” he says, “and I would be in danger.”
