The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 301: Chad Houser—Give the Children Knives and Fire

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Award-winning chef and bloody-do-gooder, Chad Houser explains why he gave up his successful restaurant to start Café Momentum, a nonprofit, fine dining restaurant that strives to break our country's cycle of incarceration and violence by employing justice-involved youths.

The ocean moves us. Surfing a wave or savoring the view. The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kelp forests. The ocean connects us. Visit Monterey Bay Aquarium.org slash connects. Well, you found it. Episode number 301 of the way I heard it entitled, Give the Children Knives and Fire. Another direct quote, Chuck, from another fantastic guest.

Yeah, Chad Hauser. Runs a foundation, cafe momentum. It's a foundation and it's also a restaurant. An awarding restaurant. One of the best restaurants in Dallas. And he's one of the top chefs in Dallas. So here's the deal. I met this guy, what, seven months ago at a stand-together event.

Stand-together, if you haven't heard, is an organization that supports my foundation, micro-works and lots and lots and lots of other organizations that try and work in bottom-up solutions. and this is a really good one. Chad uses food. I mean, he's an award-winning chef. He had the number one restaurant in Dallas, and he basically wakes up one morning and says, look, I want to run a different kind of restaurant.

I want to hire juvenile delinquents. I want to hire kids who are basically in the justice system code for in jail, basically. starts going into these detention halls and cooking with them. And then he starts doing these pop-up dinners with them. And then he eventually takes a giant breath and opens up this whole new restaurant and starts hiring them. And now he literally is on track to do this in like 30 different cities. He's got serious financial backing. He's got an amazing track record.

I mean, I don't know, Chuck, if people understand the totality of the hot mess that our criminal justice system is, but in particular, on the juvenile end, we're just putting a remarkable number of kids in the who's gal. You got to do something about the youths, you know? The youths need our attention. Chad is taking that to heart, and, you know, he treats him with dignity, self-respect, and gives them a purpose. And the great thing about this, too, it's not about like, oh, well, we're going to take these wayward youth and we're going to make them into great restaurateurs. No, he's trying to make great people. And he's got some success stories of where they've gone on to do great things in other ventures. He's using the restaurant itself as a kind of proving ground. You know, all the different jobs in the restaurant turn out to be pretty great opportunities to build some semblance of work ethic and get some skin in the game. Anyway, the results speak for themselves, and he'll talk at length about how the needle's being moved.

I just thought he was somebody that you should know, because unlike a lot of other bloody do-gooters out there, he's doing it. It's happening on like a giant scale. And not to belabor the point, but 700,000 kids are going through the juvenile justice system in this country every year. 95% of them back in 2008, anyhow, and I'm sure it's more or less the same today, were arrested for nonviolent crime. So it's just a ton of kids who are being trained to adapt to being incarcerated. The recidivism rates are awful. Somebody somewhere has to do something. I'm sorry, but the government's not going to do it.

It's going to take organizations like Stand Together, funding foundations like Chad's. And if it sounds like I'm channeling my old returning the favorite days, well, I am. This guy would have been on that show in an absolute heartbeat. Yeah. So look, it's a good conversation. It's thoughtful. You know, there is a call to act at the end. No pressure. But cafe momentum.org is doing great work. And, you know, if you feel inclined to help out after you listen to us, do so. Also, it's worth saying just on a personal level that I know this is difficult for a lot of people to hear, you know, because we are inundated today with videos. You can't put on the news without seeing some. kid, some punk hitting some old woman over the head or pushing somebody in front of the subway or, you know, running amok with a gang of other Utes going into a Walgreens or a CVS and cleaning them out. And people are frustrated and people are angry, you know. We don't talk a lot about that in this conversation, but I get it. And I think, Chuck, you know, you and I were

arguing about this earlier, good-naturedly, as we always do. But it's okay to acknowledge that two things can be true at the same time. There's some bad kids out there who have done some bad things, and there are a lot of other kids in terrible circumstances who have gone down a bad road. And we just simply have to come to terms

with the fact that if we're going to release them, if we're not going to send them all to Convict Island and let them sort it out like Lord of the Flies, then we have to do something to help change the road they're on. Anyway, rant over. Chad Hauser is doing, a thing. And what he's doing in part is he's giving these kids knives and fire.

Yes, he is. And he's not simply hoping for the best. He's making a better outcome. And he's doing it a way that is worthy of your attention. It's episode number 301. Give the children knives and fire. Right after this. Shameless plug. Long before she was paid. Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work,

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cubes for free. That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered, to make nine perfect old-fashioned every time. It's my favorite way to support Microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirits.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Well, let the record show that I arrived in the room one minute before 11.

And let the record show that, Chuck, because Chad here has made it clear in his materials that one minute late in Cafe Momentum counts as an absence. So we're about to talk with a gentleman who is not afraid to exact. Consequences, vis-a-vis punctuality. How are you, Chadhauser? I'm doing great. How are you, Mike? Honestly, I'm awesome. We're day-to-day nowadays.

All days are pretty good. Some days are slightly better than average. Yesterday, if I'm being candid, was a bit of a disappointment. I started a lot of things that I didn't finish, and that always leaves me feeling restive. But today's so far, even though I'm only halfway through it, the weather's beautiful, the coffee's hot. Chuck is coming in around a C-plus, B-minus, which is awesome. High cotton right there.

I was a minute early, and we seemed to be in a situation where the technology is our friend. It's great to see you again. Was it like seven months ago maybe in Colorado that I saw you? Yeah, July. The very end of July. Yeah. So July looks very right. Yeah.

Yeah, man. Where's the time go? I wish I knew the answer to that. Forward. Always forward. You are clearly not watching enough Star Trek, brother. How many days do you wake up in your current capacity as a bloody do-gooder, a restaurateur, a man making a difference in multiple cities and changing lives on a daily basis? How many days do you awaken where you're genuinely unsure of what day it is?

generally only days that end in why those are the days that I've gotten to the point to where now I have to wake up and think what city am I in they all run together pretty quickly isn't it crazy when you get focused on a thing that actually matters to you and you say yes to a bunch of stuff how time just bends and days one smears into the next you just kind of wake up and say where do you want me? Followed by where am I? And then you do your thing. Yeah, I think if I've learned one thing over the past several years is, you know, the popular phrase, there aren't enough hours in the day. And my response is, isn't that a good problem to have? Yeah. You know, incredibly grateful that those are what days seem like to me. Overwhelmed, but grateful. Yeah. Well, it's true,

man. They're not enough minutes in an hour. They're not enough days in a week, not enough weeks in a month and so forth and so on because once you get focused on a thing, your time is no longer your own. So tell us about cafe momentum. There are a lot of people listening who aren't exactly sure what you're doing and why you're doing it. And from what I saw when I met you and talking to the kids that I met in Colorado, you're actually moving the needle. And as I said to Chuck earlier, that's that's why we wanted you on. Because look, I'm going to say this is lightly as I can. There are a lot of well-intended bloody do-goaters out there in the world who build little statues to themselves, and they do nice things, but they don't stick with it.

They don't get the ball through the hoop. And you're doing it, man. You're absolutely doing it. So start at the beginning and make people give a damn. Well, Cafe Momentum, or the original Cafe Momentum at this point, is a restaurant that I open. in Dallas eight years ago on January 29th, 2015. For the last eight years to date, it is still continues to be ranked as one of the top restaurants in the city. And we take a lot of pride in that because it's a statement that we in the restaurant make to the city, and it's a statement that we make to our staff that they can and will rise to

whatever level of expectation is set for them. As long as we're providing them with the tools, resources, and opportunities to do so, And that's because the restaurant is entirely staffed by 15 to 19 year old justice-involved youth. So more than just a restaurant, we're a program that affords young people that are tied up in the justice system, the opportunity to participate in a 12-month curriculum that provides workforce development and income, provides 24-7 case management, provides mental health services, and education. So the restaurant you were running prior to cafe momentum was what? I mean, it wasn't involved in this kind of endeavor at all, was it?

No, not at all. My kind of anecdotal story dating back to trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life was going to culinary school. And going to culinary school wasn't even my option one. My option one was that I was going to be an English literature major. and my father, who was horrified at the prospect of me sleeping on my parents' couch for the rest of my life, encouraged me instead to follow my culinary dreams and go to culinary school. And in culinary school, I had one goal, and that was to own a restaurant and be the chef. And in 2007, I did it.

I sold my house, took all the equity out of it, took out a loan, and bought into a restaurant in the uptown area of Dallas called Parigi, and was chef and co-owner of the restaurant, you know, again, all good things starting that sentence over. It was 2007. So I mortgaged everything that I had, all my life's everything into the incredibly stable world of restaurants when the economy tanked. Okay. Wow. So since you brought up your dad, I want to know how he reacted to that incredibly mercenary, capitalistic decision of yours. And your wife, right? Because she's, got some skin in this game too. Yeah, I was an actually single dad at the time of a preteen daughter. And my dad was, I think, just thankful that I was, you know, in a trade that I would always have a job,

even if I was forever in debt, I would at least have a job and work my way out of it. I was mortified, though, because I thought, you know, the economy tanks and I thought, oh, I just mortgaged my daughter's future. Like, dad is not going to be supporting her collegiate endeavors. Probably won't even be able to buy her a pair of shoes in the next couple of months. But much to my amazement and gratitude, my first year of co-ownership, I helped grow the business by almost 40% inspired the recession and was nominated locally in Dallas as best up-and-coming chef, which is kind of the moment where you transition from thinking you're a risk-taking full. to risk-taking genius. Yeah, you did it.

Yeah, it's exactly right. I feel it's a little bit like King Midas of the culinary world, you know. I could just start touching more restaurants and turning them into gold. So why then did you change courses as dramatically as you did? And I'm sorry to ask you a two-part somewhat unrelated question, but go back for a second and tell me about culinary school because you just talked about learning a trade, and I couldn't agree more.

I think what you do is an absolute trade, but I think a lot of people are confused by it. Like, what do you study at culinary school? How much bookwork is there versus hands-on and so forth? It was both, and that's why I really appreciated it. When you're going into school and taking the classes, the instructors are constantly encouraging you to get a job in a restaurant or a hotel,

something in the food service industry. And they're right, because what you're learning in class in a book, you're applying to your work every night when you go to work. And what you're learning at work and observing at work, then you're going back and reinforcing it in textbook and lecture. And it's a really, I guess, for lack of better terms, holistic approach to really kind of ingraining and understanding. You know, they teach you in culinary school. There's three things to think about when you're opening a restaurant. The first one is location.

The second one is location and the third one is location. And you begin to see as you're networking with friends and seeing restaurants that succeed, restaurants that fail. You're starting to apply those things. Where are they located? Also just understanding how do restaurants succeed? I think we have this misnomer. Well, if it's a great chef and it's great food, it's automatically going to be successful. But if it's run by a really crappy business person, it'll die in three months.

I mean, instantly. because restaurant business is a cash flow business, and you have to understand that. So definitely not the things I thought I was going to learn when I, you know, went into class thinking, okay, I'm here to learn the five mother sauces. But, you know, then we went to the equipment class and I received a three-hour lecture on light bulbs. And I realized that restaurants was a much different game than I thought it was going to be, you know, my first day of class. Well, again, another sidebar.

but I've just become more and more interested in your world, and I think it's worth belaboring the point for a minute because people have to understand the difficulty, not just of running a successful restaurant, but just keeping the lights on in the corner eatery. I had a buddy on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, Dan McMurtry, who's developed some software that I think could be a game changer.

But when I talk to him as a business person, and he says, look, the average restaurateur has 18 days of working capital in the bank. 18 days, right? So the things that you're subject to in terms of obstacles and impediments, the things that can happen, never mind it to your lockdown,

my God, that's Armageddon. That's the meteor coming at the, but so many little things can trip up an otherwise prudent, savvy business person who might very well thrive in any other industry, but the restaurant industry is just a son of a bitch. It's hard. And it's hard under the best of circumstances.

You do everything right and it's still hard. So I just want people to understand that what you did in your industry after achieving a measure of success is, oh, what's the polite word? Crazy. Chad, it's crazy. I mean, so riff with that however you'd like. Well, it is, and I've always said that I think if everyone in this country were required to work in a restaurant for a year, this country would function very, very differently, very differently. We would be more efficient.

We would be more prepared. We would be kinder. More polite. Yes. No kidding, man. No kidding. Empathetic. Yeah.

Yeah. I laugh that, you know, last fall, I guess summer fall that showed the bear came out. And it was all the buzz in the restaurant industry and everybody's talking about it. And people kept pointing to all these nuanced things that take place on that show or props that they use. They're like, oh, see, that's how I know that it was a real restaurant. And they have real restaurant people working. And like the fact that they're using deli cups to drink out and all this stuff. And I was like, you guys are all missing the point.

the real way that you know that it's telling you the truth about restaurants is a toilet literally explodes 45 minutes before service and without flinching they're like okay who's got cleaning crap off the floor on their prep list put it on there somebody who else knows how to fix a teapipe and you just like incorporate it and you still open for service because to your point if you don't open, you don't make money. And if you don't make money, you don't survive. I mean, period. You don't, you know, if you run a law firm and a toilet explodes, hey, you close the office for a day, you delay your cases, you know, you'll still get paid. Work from home. Yeah, you'll still get paid. But if you close your doors, you don't get paid. Simple. It's very simple. Yeah. Well, I've always said, you know,

you can learn a lot from doing your time on a factory floor or a construction site, but you're right. There's no more self-contained crucible than the various jobs that you'll find inside a successful restaurant. So, you know, whether it's washing dishes or being a good hostess or being a good matri-D or being just a decent waiter or waitress, all of them require a different set of skills and a slightly different temperament. And I think maybe that's why cafe momentum and the restaurant industry, to my surprise, was so perfectly positioned to act as this mechanism where you can take a kid and put them through a kind of societal slash culinary boot camp

and maybe get something better out the other end. we always talk about there's three things that the young people are learning in working in the restaurant and part of the internship is they're required to work in every station in the restaurant so they're required to be a dishwasher and a prep cook and a line cook and a busser and server and host or hostess and the three things that they're getting out of that is number one is as you're learning new life skills and social skills and practicing them you're able to practice them you know to your point in very different environments or as i like to say The way that you appropriately disagree with a fellow line cook while you're trying to get food out for 15 tables at one time is different than the way in which you appropriately disagree with a customer that sat down 10 minutes ago, ordered three minutes ago, and is already complaining that they've waited 45 minutes for their food.

To be able to understand the nuance and be able to shift and move based on environment who you're interacting with will be the difference in how far you can carry yourself in life. And then the other thing that our young people are learning is, and you see it in a restaurant all the time, is, you know, we're dealing with a population of young people that by and large have been focused on survival for the first 15, 16, 17 years of their life, which means that they're, to survive, you leverage whatever strengths you have, right, to see another day. But they end up getting punished for those strengths, right? They end up going to detention because they're using that strength to get by. they get punished. So they see that as a detriment. But when you're in the restaurant, you're beginning to see them as drinks and you're beginning to see how you can use those drinks. You're beginning to take pride in those drinks and how they can show up to help you get to where you want to be. Another great example is you're going to find out, I get very anecdotal, but these young people,

they're just, they're incredible. And we ran a special on a Saturday night and told the entire team, whoever sells the most specials gets to order a free entree at the end of the night. And there was a young man that sold us out of every single special we had, the first 45 minutes we were open, and he wasn't even a waiter, he was a busser, but he knew first point of contact because I pour the water. So he deployed a sales pitch and said, you know, just let the server know that DJ told you to order the special. And 45 minutes later, he was eating a steak. My favorite part of that story is I love that. I literally told that story to a group of attorneys at the Dallas Bar Association. And the whole room lit up. And like all at once in chorus,

they're like, he could be a lawyer. And I love it because that's it, right? This is a skill that he's honing in a restaurant, but it's applicable across, you know, the spectrum of life. So true. Chuck's heard me say it a thousand times, all jobs are sales jobs. Every single job. We're all salesmen, right? Some of us have accepted it. Absolutely, especially a doctor.

I mean, what is a second opinion other than a second effort to close the deal, right? It's like, all jobs are sales jobs. And so, look, I'm being a bad interviewer, and I'm getting ahead. of myself a little bit. Take me back to Dallas. You've survived the crucible of opening a restaurant, staffing a restaurant, and becoming the toast of the town. You're crushing it with a restaurant whose name I can't recall. It started with a peeve, though? Perigi, the Italian word for Paris, yes. Perigi, there you are. When you can't go to Paris, French, you go to Paris, Texas. That's right. And you call it Parigi. And nobody knows the difference.

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Pure Talk. And so what happens to make you go, oh, I know, I'll open a restaurant with kids who have spent time in jail, juvenile detention, and so forth? Why? Well, it was literally right around the one-year mark of co-ownership. I was on a board of a very incredibly small nonprofit called Dallas Farmer's Market Friends, and we were hosting an ice cream competition at the market. We had reached out to local colleges with culinary programs to have their students participate. And there was a gentleman that was on the board that worked inside one of the Dallas County Juvenile Detention Facilities, putting together some programs.

And he just kind of said, well, could I bring eight young men from detention to compete against these college culinary students? And, you know, everybody on the board was like, that's like philanthropy squared. Like, yes, where do we sign up? And his exact words were great. I just need to find somebody to teach him how to make ice cream. And everyone on the board was like, oh, he'll do it and pointed at me. And some would say I was volunteered. Some would say I was volunteered.

But I found myself in May of 2008 teaching eight young men in juvenile detention how to make ice cream. And for me, the moment that I first met those eight young men, I felt tremendous shame. because the moment I met them, I realized that I had stereotyped them before I'd ever met them and I was wrong. I thought I was a better human being. But when confronted with the reality, quite literally face to face, I was wrong. And so for the next three and a half hours, I taught eight young men to make ice cream, but eight young men taught me exactly who they were, how they were, and why they were. Two days later, they're bust down to the farmer's market. They're competing against these college culinary students.

and, you know, mind you, these culinary students are in their salt and pepper checkered chef pants and their chef coats. And some of them even had those stupid tall hats. What is what the hats, man? What is what the hat? I have no earthly idea. I mean, it's a health department requirement that you have like some type of head covering or hair pulled back or whatever if you have long hair. But man, those stupid hats. No health department says we got to go with the cat in a hat, right?

I mean, it's not Dr. Seuss. Yeah. It's got to be an 18-inch hat. By comparison, these eight young men were in jail-issued khaki pants and white t-shirts. We're going to use a loose definition of the word shoes, like these slides, kind of flip-plop things, that they had them in. And yet there was no one more proud in the room than those eight young men. So wait a minute. These kids are still in juvie at this point?

They're still incarcerated at this point. They were busted down from the detention facility to the farmer's market. Yeah. So, and they were so proud, though. I mean, I can't even begin to tell you that's beaming, proud, excited. And at the end of the competition, one of them won the whole thing. He beat out the college students. He was so excited.

He's jumping in my face and screaming at the top of his lungs, sir, I just love to cook. And I just jumped right back in his face and screamed to the top of my lungs. Sir, me too. and he said, I'll never forget. To this day, I think it's the most beautiful way I've heard someone describe their heart. He said, I just love to make food and give it to people and put a smile on their face. Did he know that prior to this, or did he discover that in the course of this? You know, I would say maybe both.

Maybe there was something that he kind of knew and understood, but like being in that very moment. because the general public's coming by and sampling all these ice creams, and they're the ones that are voting. And so there was this perhaps a moment where he kind of tied it all together of, you know, but what resonated in me in that moment was two things. Number one is it reiterated to me where my love of food and cooking comes from. And that's my family. Growing up here in Texas and a very, very tight-knit East Texas family that, you know, every Sunday my mom and my dad, myself, my aunt's, uncles, cousins.

We all went to my grandparents' house for Sunday supper, and we all broke bread together. And so as a child, to me, food meant a lot more than just nourishing the body. It was about the soul. It was about the family. And so for this young man to say that, to me, was echoing my feelings about food, but also understanding I knew his story. And it would have been perfectly normal and admirable if he would have said, said, I want to make food and make money and help pay rent, pay the electric bill, put food on the

table. It would have been noble. But he said, I just love to make food and give it to people and put a smile on their face. And he told me when he got released, he was going to get a job in a restaurant. And then he asked my professional chef opinion on whether he should work at Wendy's or Chili's. I immediately went to heating the advice of my father and told him, whoever hires you first and whoever pays you the most money second. But it was when I was driving home, I went from being inspired to angry. I went from being motivated to sad and discouraged because I started thinking about his story and I realized he was never going to make it to a Wendy's or Chili's. When a young person goes into detention, they're released. Nothing changes. So all the circumstance

that took place that pushed them on that path of detention, it doesn't change. And I would even argue in some ways it can be worse. And it just made me really reflective about myself, because I started just in some ways gratitude for opportunities that I had had in life, but then also acknowledging when I was 16 years old, the decisions I had to make and the decisions that he has to make are very different. When I was 16, I was also given opportunity after opportunity to succeed. I was given opportunity after opportunity to fail and try again. And yet this young man was given one shot to make ice cream to show the world who he was and what he could do

and it wasn't even going to land him a job at Wendy's or Chili's. I kind of had this moment of thinking that, you know, for each of us, our lives in many ways were dictated by choices that were made for us before we were ever born in kind of a Malcolm Gladwell outliers kind of way. Yes, yes, I agree with that. And I agree with basically the privilege that you're talking about, right?

I mean, we don't all start from the same starting line. I think that's pretty reasonable. But go back to the very, very, very top of this conversation. What did we talk about? You know, how's your day going? Somebody asked me. And I talked about, well, I was a minute early and the coffee is hot and our hookup appears to be working. Win, win, win.

It really is the small things stacked up on top of each other. that start to define your day, your week, your hour, your minute. And when you tell me that that kid won an ice cream making contest, a thing that most of us might go, okay, that was nice, carry on, what's next? You know, for him, you know, he's Sir Edmund Hillary. He just climbed Everest. He did it. And I get it.

You know, the opportunity to do another thing that makes you feel that way, that's intoxicating. And there you are, driving home, going back and forth between inspired and ashamed, which is a bit of a whipsaw. So I get it. That's the moment, right? So now you become the bloody do-gooder that I searched for years for. When I was hosting Returning the Favor, you're exactly the kind of person that we look for. People who are going about their life, and they have one of these moments you described, and suddenly they're agitated. They wake up agitated because, A, the world's not exactly the way they think it ought to be.

And B, they feel convicted all of a sudden to do something about it. And I don't want to put words into your mouth, but was that the essence of what happened on your ride home? That's exactly what happened is you're left with a choice. And every one of these things, you're left with a choice, which is, am I going to walk away and pretend it doesn't exist? Pretend I didn't have this moment. Pretend not to care. or am I going to lean in and do something different? Option one was not an option.

It was, hey, if you don't like it, then you do something about it, period. What I didn't know was what that actually meant, right? In that moment of like, so what am I supposed to do here? So I just started hanging out in juvenile detention more often, which going back to my dad was like, yeah, I saw this coming. Great, perfect. One way or the other, he's going to wind up in the car. So you enter this world, really for the first time, whether it's through guilt or curiosity

or conviction. How does it happen? Like, take me to the point where you go, it's going to be called Cafe Momentum, and it's going to consume my life. And I'm going to pull everybody into this thing who's around me, which, I mean, I get how foundations work, dude. They're overwhelmed. You know what, now that I think about it, when you look at the restaurant business, as

the rocky shore where entrepreneurs from sea to shining sea get smashed into pieces. And when you look at the foundation space, the place where big, good-hearted people who want to change the world go to fail, statistically speaking, you know, 501Cs fail faster than most small businesses. All right. So, yeah. So what do you do? You start a foundation in the most fraught small business world that you can.

Well, anecdotally, when I was telling people I wanted to open a nonprofit restaurant, essentially taking kids out of jail and teaching a play with knives and fire, you didn't go so well, right? But the first thing people would say is, but aren't all restaurants nonprofit? Well, at least, you know, I have a working history. I got a good resume. But, you know, for me, in the moment, the answer was to listen. And so I went in and do the same gentleman. he afforded me opportunities to go in every so often and do little cooking classes with youth in the facilities and just listen. We throw a lot of research and money and et cetera,

et cetera into trying to solve a problem when we just really exacerbate it as opposed to actually just listening to, you know, do I want to know how to help these young people, what I'm supposed to do with these young people, I should just ask them, what do you need? What's going on? Tell me about life. And that's what I did. I just listened. I listened. I would go in and teach and listen. And two themes came out of it. One is the staff inside the facility would use two words over and over and over again. Consistency and stability. Consistency and stability. And the young people are telling you stories that thematically revolve around those two words. Consistency is. Consistency instability. Now, the irony of it is, thinking of opening a restaurant, working with justice-involved

youth, that a restaurant would be a consistent and stable environment. I get the irony. Right. But that was it is what for me was, what do I know to do? What do I know how to do? And how does that apply to working with these young people? That was where the idea for the original iteration of cafe momentum came about was in and actually it was I was closing down my restaurant one night I was on the phone with my business partner and I was complaining that I just I had been working with these youth for a year I had done nothing I wasn't moving the needle at all we were making fried rice once a week but you know that's about it and so was just complaining and she just kind of snapped and said then what do you want to do and I just kind of snapped back and said I just want to

open a restaurant and let the kids run it. And she said, that could be a good idea. And I thought, well, we've both been drinking. So we know it's a good idea. So we know it's great. Sorry, Chad, but to recap, you spent a year going into the Dallas detention center teaching kids how to cook various things and realizing that that wasn't offering. the requisite amounts of stability and consistency that would in fact make an observable difference. No, and in fact, it's how we got the name, Cafe Momentum, was even understanding that for a lot of young people, for me, I saw heard things that I didn't know were possible, probable. There are youth that reoffend in a facility so that they don't get released because detention,

offers you three meals a day, a shower, a bed. Yeah, consistency. You're provided education access, mental health services, adult mentoring. There's a lot that happens that you get when you're locked up that just goes away. The day they send you home. And that's literally where the name Kathy Momentum came from was, well, how do we keep, you know, I'm not a fan of incarcerating youth. and I think I built a model that's more effective,

understanding that there are still these resources that they're getting there. So how do we keep that going once they're out so that they're not having to go down the same path that they did, that led them, you know, to the facility to begin with? What's interesting about the word is there's nothing inherently good about momentum. I mean, if you're going in the wrong direction and you got momentum, that ain't great. If you're falling out of a plane, momentum is really... It's not your friend.

Not going to help. Unless you have a parachute, right? But even then, you know. So it's the old, you know, stay the course. Be persistent and stay the course. Yeah, well, only if you're going in the right direction. That's right. So obviously you're trying to course correct.

But go ahead, keep going. So you actually raise money. You open the restaurant. And I want to understand how you decide who comes in and who doesn't, what benchmarks exist and what obstacles you ran into with customers, backers, etc. I feel like throughout the course of this story, there's a lot of, well,

I joke and said, telling people I want to open a nonprofit restaurant, taking kids out of jail and teaching them play at knives and fire. But the truth is, that's what people heard. And you begin to see all the stereotypes that people have about youth in detention. I was in a meeting with a gentleman one time and the first thing out of his mouth,

and he was a potential landlord that was going to lease us a restaurant space, and literally the first thing out of his mouth was, let's just cut to it. You and I know, so what are you going to do when the kids stab each other in the kitchen? And I want to say, man, you're a landlord of a restaurant space.

Like, you know people that work in restaurants. Why would, like, our kids are a step up above the derelicts that I've worked with in the past in restaurants. then people would say things like, those kids don't want to work, they just want to collect a check. Those kids have never been to a nice restaurant. They can't cook your food. And at this point, I had been nominated now for several years as Best Chef in Dallas. So I had a good reputation. And my thing was, but if you met them like I did, you wouldn't say those things about them like I learned, right? So how do we create that? Because on the one end, forget a restaurant, we're never going to have a restaurant. We're never going to have a

restaurant, a cafe momentum restaurant and program if this is the way that the community views these young people. But even more so, like, this is what you tell these young people. They are every single day. You tell them they don't want to work. They just want to collect a check. You tell them they can't. They've never been to a nice restaurant. They can't cook your food. This is what they hear. And for a young person, you begin to see that it's the scarlet letter they wear on their chest that says, this is who I am. It's not who I was born to be. It's not who I want to be. But the world tells me this is who I am over and over and over again. I just start to believe it. And so for me, it was how do I create a situation where to create that proximity,

where people are meeting our young people, they are standing face to face with them. They're learning who they truly are. And so I came up with the idea to do a series of monthly pop-up dinners. The idea was, the first one was June 2011. The idea was to go in one of the top restaurants in Dallas on a Sunday night when they're closed, sell tickets to a private dinner. The chef writes a four-course menu, the staff not only helping the chef in the kitchen, but also serving to the level and quality of service of that restaurant were eight young men that we would bust in from a juvenile detention facility. In full candor, based on the reaction I had gotten just talking about the idea, I didn't think anybody to show up so much so that I had a

plan to call my mom and have her guilty ladies in her Bible study class into buying tickets to the dinner so that somebody would be there. How many tickets did you? How many tickets did you? want to sell for the first one? Yeah, 50. We wanted to sell 50 tickets for $50. I made it BYOB because I thought nothing says we're trying to help youth more than putting them in a room full of drunks. With knives and fire. I mean, yeah, the whole plan was winning. But you know, the first, the dinner sold out in 24 hours. It actually oversold before we could turn the ticket link off. And there were 63 people at that dinner that night. And every single person when they stopped standing on their chairs and clapping for these eight young men at the end of the night, they walked out the

door and they looked me in the eyes and said, you know, this could be my son. And that was it. That proximity, truly getting to know them, changed everything. I will tell you that we did get wise. And by December of 2011, we doubled the ticket price from $50 to $100. And we provided and regulated the alcohol. But by spring of 2012, the dinners were selling out in literally 15 seconds. We would put the ticket link up in 15 seconds later, it would be sold out. And it was right around June, July of 2012 that had a conversation with my business partner and just said, you know, I need to walk the talk. It's one thing to tell these young people that you believe in them. It's something very, very different to prove it. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician.

He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise. and Ben's absolute determination to keep it has not only propelled good ranchers into the top tier of meat delivery companies, it's fueled enormous awareness among meteors like me that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported meat to be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switch to good ranchers. If I'm being honest, though, I doubt that I would have stayed this long had the quality not been so exceptional.

single cut I've devoured from Good Ranchers has been straight up delicious and every morsel was raised on a small American farm or ranch. Give them a try. Subscriptions are affordable and flexible. In fact, if you start your plan today, you'll get free meat for life and $40 off your first order. Just use code mic at good ranchers.com. Free meat for life, $40 off your first order. Good Ranchers.com. American Meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch, get good ranchers now. So the pop-up dinners were sort of the connective tissue between you going into the detention halls and actually opening up a fixed restaurant where you're going to do this. But I know, I mean, when I met you, I talked to a couple of the kids who were there in Colorado and one of your partners.

Who else was there? I'm drawing a blank on. Yeah, so we had our chief strategy officer, Olivia Cole was there. Olivia, right. And then you had Demondric, who was teaching you how to make biscuits. Yeah. Evelyn and I'm unique were there as well. So somebody told me there was a plan to do a pop-up dinner at the Super Bowl. And I just read that you did it.

I mean, like, just a couple of weeks ago. We did it. Yeah, we did it. I'm still, that's the hard thing about getting older is I used to, my record in working in restaurants was 130 hours that I worked in one week. Wow. Now I feel like sometimes if I work 13 hours, I'm like, whoo. I got about three-day recovery ahead of me.

You don't even know what day it is, Chad, remember? It doesn't matter. It ends in why. That's all that matters. It ends in why. With the success of the restaurant and program in Dallas, we've been afforded a lot of our opportunity to expand and a lot of inquiries about how do we open a cafe momentum in our city? How do we open a cafe in our city? And so in March of 2020, here we go again with the really

incredible business decisions. In March of 2020, um, started a whole new organization called Momentum Advisory Collective designed to build more cafe momentum restaurants and programs across the country, launched it two weeks before the world shut down. Perfect. So it became, yeah, it was a really impressive to call. call people up in Pittsburgh and say, so you were saying you wanted a restaurant, right? Well, have I got something for you? But Momentum Advisory Collective is doing just that, right? We're opening up Caffe Women in Pittsburgh in the next couple of weeks. We've already started programming and catering in Nashville. We're exploring five other markets. But one of the other things that we

focus on at Momentum Advisory Collective is to build that conversation, to create more of those pop-up moments, right? Yeah. where we're engaging the public abroad because the reality is this. We're going to build 30 cafe women home restaurants and programs in the next 10 years. That's a piece of sonic ice on the iceberg that is youth incarceration. There are 728,000 youth that entered the justice system in this country every single year. So we're not doing our job unless we're trying to put ourselves out of business. So success looks like failure.

And then I just go back to washing dishes. It was a simpler time. Okay, that's awfully ambitious, but maybe if we could all just take a second to talk about the results that you saw, because this must have been another moment of discovery for you. It's one thing to follow your gut, and it's one thing to sell a bunch of tickets and watch people buy them, because the very act of buying it makes them feel good. That's a genius. by the way, right? You want to give people a chance. You want to appeal not just to their sense of

goodness and altruism. You want to give them a great meal. You want to give them something that's of value in return. And if you can do both of those things, you know, I just dropped a couple hundred bucks the other night in a restaurant that frankly, I didn't have a lot to feel good about. I had to park two miles away. It rained on me. The service was subpar. The food was kind of chewy. And there was a sign on the door that said, thank you for your patience, but we've got half a staff and we can't hire anybody and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's the restaurant world. To be able to sit down at a pop-up meal, pay a fair price, get a great meal, and then leave thinking you might help turn somebody's deal around, in my view, that's the lesson here,

to actually offer something of genuine value in exchange for doing a thing that makes you feel good. That's simmering right underneath the guts of your philanthropic bullion base. Well, that's not bad. I'm going to steal that. I'm right on. Coming soon to the cafe momentum near you, philanthropic. Today's special. Philanthropic bullia base with Ratatoui on the side.

And, you know, as well, you can have the most well-intended feel-good mission, but who's going to show up and support you if the food just sucks? No kidding, man. There's no excuse. You can't. There's no excuse for that. No, there isn't. There are a few things in life that are as rewarding as a wonderful meal, and there are a few things in life as depressing as a really bad meal. So we want to.

We want to do both, not both. We want to do a really great meal that you feel good inside and out when you come through. And it's important as well because it's for us, from a business standpoint, we want to be a great operating business model. But from a, you know, a statement that we're making, if you walk in and you have a great meal, then you're thinking about those things, right? That I didn't think those kids could do that. I didn't think you're beginning to kind of break that down. And what a great way for us to start a conversation with you. Right. So beyond the good business sense of acknowledging the fact that if the food is no good, our best intentions are just a pile of dirty rags. Who cares, right? Beyond that, talk about the impact statistics, because that's really where the chili meets the cheese. And I'm sure your larger endeavor would be doomed if you didn't have a really great story to tell. I have a very love-hate relationship with data. I think data is wonderful, and I can learn a lot to know what we need to tweak and whatever,

but also understanding that we as human beings aren't just data, right? Like you said earlier, each one of these young people come in at a very different starting line. We worked with over 1,000 youth in Dallas. That means over 1,000 different starting lines. You're dealing with young people, young women, some of whom have been sex trafficked. young men who have experienced horrendous foster care experiences and significant issues with homelessness, it runs the gamut. Young people that eat one meal a week and have for years. And so how do you take that and kind of break it down into being honest to the population you serve, but also in telling

the right story, but also proving what impact looks like? And so when we first started, we did a lot of work and a lot of focus on recidivism. Kind of a low-hanging fruit. But, you know, one of the things that we do really good in this country has locked people up and make sure they keep coming back. And it starts at a young age, you know, and kind of nationally, I think it's something around average of close to 50% of young people of youth will come out of detention and reoffend within 12 months.

And it's like almost 70% then by like three years. and when you, specific to the work that we're doing, we just did a dinner in Denver, and I was researching some data there, 75% of the adults in prison in Denver said their first time they went to jail, they were a teenager. Sure. And so you can point to that pretty quickly

and see some remarkable improvements in the work that we do. And, you know, when we first opened, our recidivism rate was 15%, which is, you know, significantly less. But I think the story that's told there is our local municipalities actually budget to incarcerate kids because they have to every year because they know X number of youth are going to go into jail. And I just can't think to myself, but like, wouldn't it be better if we use that money to invest in them rather than lock them up? Like, wouldn't it be better, like from a business standpoint, a better long-term investment or return investment? And so as we've kind of continued to grow, we've started to push on things that aren't such like low.

hanging fruit and focus on things that are really going to show kind of where their trajectory is headed in life. Yeah. And on the one end, no child should be coming into our program thinking, this is great. Their whole goal is to keep me out of jail, you know, that's not very aspirational. So we focus on things like education. We focus on things like employment. We focus on mental health.

These are all indicators of what's going to happen 10, 15, 20 years down the road, more than just making sure that they stay out of jail. It's why we built our own high school in Dallas. We went from having 54% of our youth coming into the program as high school dropouts. And I easily win an argument that 45 of the other 46% were just completely disengaged with school. They've been kicked out.

They're far behind because of going into detention. Schools, one of the first places that's ever made them feel bad or dumb. 42% of the youth that we work with are experiencing homelessness. If you don't know where you're sleeping at night, your priority is not, you know, going to read where the red phone grows on Tuesday. And so, you know, building our own school, today 100% of the youth in our program

are in school and on track to graduate, or have already graduated. Almost a third of them are voluntarily going into college. Looking at our youth and understanding that 100% of them come from some form or level of trauma, some type of adverse childhood experience. And our program, 85% of them are voluntarily receiving therapy and mental health services.

These are the things that we're looking at now to start painting a big picture of what generational change actually looks like. So, Chad, your success stories at this point, after seven or eight years of this, must be voluminous. Yeah, they're what drives me every day. You know, we had a young lady that came through our program named Maya. When she first came to our program, she had no stable housing. She had a lot of trust issues because of her past and things that had happened, even in the group home that she was staying in. Maya completed our program, graduated high school, went on to college, graduated magna cum laude,

and is now a medical assistant in the gastrointestinal unit at Children's Hospital of Dallas. Just an incredible human being. Following along those same lines we had at Children's School, hospital. We had a young lady that went through our program named Evelyn, who English was her second language. And so when Evelyn was growing up, she was made fun of a lot because she didn't know English well, would misspeak sometimes, and she became very self-conscious. When she came to CAFE Momentum, one of the first things that she said to her case manager was, I came here to make money not friends.

Single mom. And she spoke recently right before she finished our program and told the group that what she didn't realize is that she was gaining something stronger than family through the staff at Cafe Momentum. And interestingly enough, Evelyn is now a concierge at Children's Hospital. And they hired her because she's bilingual. Because she's fluent. So that thing.

That thing is now her strength. It's her superpower. And we just got an email that she was given the award for value-driven employee of the month, that she has exhibited their values more than any other employee in the hospital and was given the award. So the bar, again, I mean, I know you made this point earlier, but it's not just how many people you're keeping from recidivism. It's look what's happening. You're not paving the way for a career in the restaurant industry.

You're paving the way for a career in life. In life. And not just for our kids, but their kids. Evelyn's a mom. I'll give you one more because it just makes me chuckle. We had a young man that went through our program, and in an interview after completing our program, he was asked,

what was your least favorite job in the restaurant? And he said, waiting tables. He said, I hated it. I was so intimidated by people. They said, so what are you doing now? He said, I'm waiting tables. But this young man, his name's James, he went on to wait tables while I put himself through diesel mechanic school.

Because he loved working on cars, thought there was going to be good money, being a diesel mechanic, put himself through school. Well, he started working on diesels and said, you know what? I love building cars in my garage. I hate working on diesel's for a career. So he went into the Navy.

And now, interestingly enough, he's a medical assistant in the Navy stationed in Guam. But I love that story, too, because it shows the restaurant wasn't the end goal for him, but it's the bridge that got him to the goal where he wanted to go. And it provided the financial support for him to transition into going to diesel mechanic school, realizing that wasn't the right thing for him, and then going on to the Navy. Way leads on the way. I got to ask you about the money. You know, it's just worth acknowledging my foundation like yours is supported in part by Stand Together.

That's the other reason I wanted to have you on. They don't support endeavors that don't have momentum and don't have the ability to scale. So I know that, you know, you're taking a big swing on this. And I think, too, the thing we have in common is that in my world, I try and honestly confront the stigmas and stereotypes. and the myths and misperceptions that keep people from pursuing a career in the trade. And you're really doing the exact same thing with those stigmas and stereotypes that would keep people from giving somebody a second chance, in this case, especially youth. So knowing that, knowing that those stigmas and stereotypes are so pervasive,

how are you going to get past it and raise enough money to actually duplicate this in areas where you're not. I'll just be, say it plainly, Chad. Part of the reason why Dallas sets money aside to make sure they can fund the detention centers is because Chad Hauser's aren't popping up all over the place. Right? So how are you going to clone yourself?

Well, I have to tell you, there are a lot of people that are very grateful that there's only one Chad Hauser that exists. Mainly a lot of my teachers. You know what we've found is that there are a lot of people around the country in every city that we've been to so far that care deeply and passionately about this same population of young people. They've just never been provided the resource, the roadmap or the business plan in some instances, to pull something off. But what we were proving in other cities already is we've found those people. We're surrounding them with our knowledge and support, and they're pulling it off.

I mean, the work that's happening right now in Pittsburgh and Nashville is incredible. And they're building their own conversations in those cities. And I would even say when you break down what we've done, it's not a foreign model, right? people open restaurants all the time. Sure. One need only read Kitchen Confidential to know that people have been hiring people and giving them second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth chances for decades in restaurants. But I think what does make us unique is just taking a more holistic approach that focuses on the individual and not the organization. And by that I simply mean that we, um, we.

work in the community. So a young person's coming into a restaurant. Our case managers are helping them secure housing, but we don't have our own housing. We're working with housing partners. We're working with food banks. We're working with county hospitals. We're working with legal groups to provide legal advocacy. But we're just making sure that all these people are talking and communicating because what you find for so many of our young people is they're in the legal system, They're in the education system. They're in the medical system. And they're 16 years old trying to navigate it by themselves.

And there's no adult walking around saying, hey, let's do this together. Let's make sure. We just had an incident a few weeks ago in Dallas where in the definition of insanity, and I wish I could say it was the only time it's ever happened. But a young person on probation and their probation officer schedules them for a mandatory probation check-in at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. where's a young person supposed to be at 2 p.m. on Tuesday? I'd go with school. I would go with school.

And so this young person now has a choice. I can skip school and show up for my probation appointment because if I don't show up for my probation appointment, then they could revoke my probation, and I could go back to detention. But if I skip school and do that, then I'm truant. And the school is going to report my truancy to the probation officer, which is then going to cause my probation to be revoked, and I'm going to go back to detention.

There's no win, right? But that's where our case managers step in and intervene, and they're like, okay, let's walk through this. So we're going to call your probation officer, and we're going to talk to them about you being in school, and we're going to schedule and just walk them through it so that they're kind of seeing, like, how to maneuver around it, and they can do it on their own the next time. But again, you know, I would love to take all the credit in the world for it. I don't think that what we've built is rocket science. I think we just take kind of a unique approach, but teaching others that approach, I'll give you another anecdotal story. When you

hire case managers or essentially social workers, they all come with a very bureaucratic mentality, bureaucratic muscle memory of how they function and do their jobs. Data driven. And they're all in paper pushing. I get it. A lot. A lot. of forms, lots of forms. And they're attracted to coming to work for CAFE Momentum because it's not the norm, right? Because it is more holistic, because it's not just checking a box and pushing a paper and then passing someone along. It's more personal. But when they come to work with us, their muscle memory is still that same.

So we started doing an exercise with case managers a couple of years ago in the meetings. we had to say, all right, so we're going to go around the room. First question is, what's one rule you wish you could have broken last week? And answer question two is, how would you have broken it? And just start to have that conversation around, you know, them kind of breaking those habits and doing the actual work that they want to do. And I think that's just a lot of the work that we do. That's so ironic, you know, changing a pattern is like the overarching point, right?

I mean, that's the whole point with the youth. get them out of their heads, change their pattern, change their course. You got to do the same thing with your caseworkers. You've got to do the same thing. I mean, it's the business of life, right? It's just checking back from time to time to say, oh, you know what? I'm not on the road I thought I was on. How do I fix that?

What do you need that you're not getting? Or what do you need that you, what are you getting that you would like more of? More hours in the day? Did we say that already? Yeah, we did. Can't help you there. Fresh out of them. knows. Yeah, done. Sorry.

I feel a lot of gratitude in what we are getting. I mean, I think in the world of nonprofits, you always need more money. As we build more programs, you need more money to build more programs. But I also think, you know, as I mentioned earlier, it's just more opportunities like this, more opportunities to have the conversation, more opportunities to sound a little silly, to bring people to the table. Doesn't that silly at all. Look, it's very noisy out there. And there are a lot of well-intended people doing a lot of important things. And, you know, whether it's the TV world, you know, in a thousand shows that everybody's screaming for you to watch,

most of which seem to be food shows, by the way. What the, I mean, isn't it crazy? When I was a kid, it was like the galloping gourmet and Julia Child had a show. And now entire networks, 24-7, this one's being chopped and this one's being yelled at. And I mean, what Gordon did. And you mentioned Tony, Jesus. It's just, it's amazing. It's amazing how the food industry copulated with the entertainment business and gave birth to this enormous family of mutants with respect.

Oh, let me tell you, people have the popular misnomer that all we're doing is setting kids up to work in restaurants the rest of their life. And if that's what they want to do, certainly they can, right? And the National Restaurant Association has great data on that. 95% of all restaurant managers in this country started off as a dishwasher. 85% of all restaurant owners in this country, present company included, started off as a dishwasher. So there is that path. But you're learning all these skills that you can take wherever you want, like we talked about before. But I used to tell people all the time, I said, I don't want these kids to be chefs.

I don't need the competition anymore. Food Network has absolutely ruined it. for the rest of us because everyone, we went from having, you know, a food critic that would come in and try your food and customers that would come in and kind of talk about it or whatever, to all of a sudden there's the food network comes out and every person that walks in your restaurant is now a chef and they're a food critic. They're the chef food critic combo. Right. And they have a Yelp account. And so it's the hat trick, you know. I just, no, we're good.

I remember when I was first talking to chef friends about leaving Parigi and going to cafe momentum, and I'll never forget a chef friend of mine was like, oh my gosh. So isn't it going to be so nice to go into a restaurant? You don't have to cook for all those people. And I was like, who else do you think is going to come eat the food? It's still the same people. Right. It's still the same critics.

Yeah. Well, it's weird, dude, because, you know, your foundation and your mission needs publicity. You need a light shown upon it because there are a lot of people in this country who are going to love what you're doing when they take a deep dive into your thing. But you don't need America's next top cafe momentum shop, you know, this week on Cafe Momentum, Knives and Fire and drunk customers. Yeah, I mean, it's like it's just one more piece of the miasma that you have to navigate. You need promotion and publicity, but not that kind. You need support, but not with the strings that are so often attached to it. Stand Together does a great job, better than most, I think, in finding organizations like this.

But all I'm trying to articulate as we land this plane is that you are absolutely surrounded by obstacles in a world where your success necessitates your failure. and you still need help and support encouragement guidance from all directions. So good luck with that. Hey, I want to jump in for a second because before this little show started, you mentioned something about the Super Bowl and an elevator. And Mike said, well, we better hit record and that hasn't come up yet. So I just want to give that to you. So at the Super Bowl,

we bought out a food truck and rebranded it, Players Coalition, fueled by Caffe Momentum and supported by Stand Together Foundation, and built this whole activation outside the Media Center and NFL experience to engage media and fans alike in joining our conversation, understanding our model, and really having them rethink what the model for youth justice can and should look like in our country. And we had some incredible current and former NFL players come out to our activity. and spend time with our young people, with the media, with fans. And so I was with George Kittle and his dad, Bruce, and sister Emma, and an incredible family. They're an incredible family, and I've gotten to know Bruce and Emma for about a year or so, and just really great people. And I just met George for the first time. And we're going from the media center over to street level to go to this food truck activation.

And we're on an elevator. And we're talking about something. And I said, yeah, I said, well, I was told by a gentleman one time that I had a face for radio and a voice for print, but I can't write, so I don't know what to do. And George just looked over at me and he goes, no, your voice is okay. A face for radio and a voice for print. That's funny. Well, and also apocryphal, right? You play the cards you get.

All you can do is what you can do. and you're doing it, man. You're still waking up agitated. You're still trying to make the world a better place, and I think that makes you interesting. Final question. You miss Bourdain? A lot.

I first started cooking when Kitchen Confidential came out. You know, as a young guy, I had a newborn child at home. I was going to culinary school and working full-time and trying to figure out if I even knew what I was doing, you know, to read Kitchen Confidential was, it was soothing, I think is a good word for me because I understood, you know, a lot of what he talks about, about you're just on kind of autopilot with constantly thinking about dishes and this and that

and figuring it out and learning. And it was, it made me feel like less crazy. Just keep going. Just keep going. Yeah. Yeah. And that crazy is okay. And I had a good fortune to meet him when caffeine momentum.

had just opened, he came to the Dallas Museum of Art and we got to cater some food and got to meet him. And so, and I think just the way that he, his interpretation of what food means in the world was really special. And it was a gift that he shared with all of us. You know, the way that he transformed or took tourism and turned it into travel and took food, and turned it from some utilitarian thing that we all need vis-a-vis our addiction to chewing and swallowing things and made it emblematic of something much, much bigger. Listening to you talk for the last hour, you're doing something very similar. I mean, you're doing it in your own way, but you're using the restaurant and you're using food to do something that has very little to do with digestion.

That's what I meant when I said, you're playing the cards you have. You're clearly a bloody do-gooder. You just happened to be a great chef who happened to have some success in the restaurant industry. And now you want to give something back. And so here you go. You made your own momentum. And I'll tell you, because of Anthony Bourdain, I spent two weeks in Lebanon. And I was being hosted by a gentleman named Kamal Muzawak, who the running joke in Lebanon, is that his name appears in the New York Times.

more often than the president of Lebanon. But Kamal built a farmer's market in Beirut called Sukhel Taib, the good market, and then a complementary restaurant called Talet or Table. And Kamal's philosophy is that food is the equalizer. Food is what brings people together. And his example is that, you know, in Lebanon, you've got a country that's divided by the Christians, the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Druze. But they've been. make a cookie in the Middle East called Mamul. Little date nut cookie called Mamul. He's like, you could bring somebody from each of those faiths to a table and put a plate

of Mamul in the center of the table. And the anger will turn anecdotal because they'll all tell childhood stories about eating Mamal. And that's the power of food. And finally, that gets us to where I hope we would land because everything you just said about food, you can cross out food and write in work. And that's my world. I'll never forget speaking to a really rarefied group of very, very successful men in the woods seven years ago, one of whom happened to be Charles Koch, who you know. And I told the story of dirty jobs.

I told my own feeling of being disconnected from the very thing that mattered most to me. and getting reconnected to that thing vis-a-vis a TV show. You know, I told a few gross-out stories and hard work stories. And I prepared to leave, Chad. I mean, I was done. You know, they invited me up to do that. I wound up staying for three days because the 2,800 men who had assembled for this event, mostly older and all very accomplished,

they all pulled me aside to tell me about their first job, right? to tell me about that time in their distant past when things were simpler, but weirdly unified. And so there's not much left on the planet in 2023 that is truly universal. But food, work, energy, that stuff is still pulling us together. And so thanks for using your powers for good. Final plug, where do people go to write those elusive checks? Please go to cafe momentum.org, and you can keep updated and see all of our expansion plans and how you can get involved in helping us build a new model for youth justice.

It's a great cause. Thanks for doing what you're doing. Next time I'm in Dallas, which will be not too long from now, I don't think. Oh, that's good. I'll swing by. Yeah. Do I know the restaurant for you to eat at? Something tells me you do.

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