Dallas’s Café Momentum Is Going to the Super Bowl | Eater Dallas

"I’ve watched Café Momentum—an amazing, award-winning New American restaurant in a minimal yet colorful Downtown Dallas space—use food and hospitality as a vehicle for change: it provides internships for at-risk and justice-involved youth to learn restaurant hard skills as well as life coaching, social skills, and development, and those young people prepare the signature chicken and biscuits that will be served from a food truck outside State Farm Stadium in Arizona at this year’s Super Bowl. Founder and CEO Chad Houser has built partnerships with the NFL since hosting a pre-draft dinner in 2019, created the Momentum Advisory Collective (with programs also in Nashville and Pittsburgh) in 2020, and worked with the Stand Together Foundation and the Player’s Coalition to offer free lunches to Super Bowl media with appearances by former players Shaun Alexander, Anquan Boldin, Dhani Jones, and criminal justice reform activist Alice Marie Johnson. Houser credits a biscuit-making class with Shaun Alexander for helping forge the relationship with the league, and during the pandemic he organized virtual dinners featuring athletes from the WNBA, NFL, MLS, and MLL so young people could feel seen, heard, and educate those with large platforms. Alice Marie Johnson—CEO of Taking Action for Good and pardoned in 2018 after Kim Kardashian’s lobbying—has focused on juvenile detention, and her visit to a Dallas juvenile facility inspired a young woman named Dee to become a Café Momentum ambassador; Dee later served the café’s chicken and biscuits at the 2020 Super Bowl pop-up and received a culinary scholarship award from Johnson. Houser also recounts the harm of media stereotyping after an ambassador was murdered hours after a pop-up in Nashville and falsely framed as drug-related, underscoring Café Momentum’s broader goal of using athlete and media platforms to change narratives about justice-involved youth and advocate for juvenile justice reform." - Courtney E. Smith