Seemingly every week — sometimes every day — someone approaches Chad Houser about expanding his modest restaurant beyond its lone location in downtown Dallas across from Thanks-Giving Square. In part, this is because the meals served there are as fine as any in this city. This is my opinion; but, also, fact. The service, too, is never less than vigilant and warm.

But those ingredients, key to any eatery's success, are not the main reasons why Houser, the chef and owner, is pestered, over and over and over, about opening a Café Momentum in another city. That's because Café Momentum is not about the food or the service — not only, anyway. Above all else, the restaurant is about the kids — in the kitchen, the dining room, the front of the house.

Kids who were once in juvenile detention, who were considered delinquent and troubled and perhaps even beyond salvation. Kids who sold drugs; who harmed others and themselves; who are homeless; and who had maybe given up on the world because it felt as though the world had given up on them first.

Houser could, of course, mimic Café Momentum's menu elsewhere. But the restaurant's template cannot be cloned without accounting for case management, counseling, financial literacy courses and countless other variables needed to keep kids from falling backward into lives from which they are trying to escape. Houser had a hard enough time trying to create the model in his hometown, over the span of several years. It feels daunting, unthinkable, to replicate that effort in a city where you're a stranger, where you don't know juvenile court judges and don't have a connection at detention centers.

"Expansion has always been the goal," Houser said a few days ago of the restaurant he opened four and half years ago to great acclaim and admiration. "But there's an old adage: The second restaurant is always the hardest one to open."

But finally, expansion is closer to reality than reverie. And it's because of a most unlikely combo: former National Football League MVP and three-time Pro Bowl running back Shaun Alexander and a charitable foundation funded by (yes, that) Charles Koch.

Alexander, selected in the 2000 NFL Draft by the Seattle Seahawks using what had been the Dallas Cowboys' first-round pick, met Houser through the Koch founded and funded Stand Together Foundation, which essentially vets, trains and funds some of the country's most impactful nonprofits. Alexander told me last week that he wants to see a Café Momentum in every NFL city. It wasn't hyperbole. And it's not impossible.

"It just takes time," said Stand Together's Nick Brown, who connected Houser and Alexander. "We want to do this at Chad's pace. We're not going to push them into any rapid decision until they are 100% comfortable."

Stand Together helped pull together a Café Momentum pop-up during April's NFL Draft in Nashville. The foundation found kids at the juvenile justice center. Houser recruited them with his now-familiar speech about how he was going to teach them to play with knives and fire, and how plenty of people don't believe they can be trusted with such skills. Plenty of people — but not him.

Alexander, who graced the cover of Madden NFL 07, introduced Houser to other NFL players and execs. And now more dinners are planned in Los Angeles and Houston in coming months.

"None of us want to imagine making a decision when you're 14 that can cost you the rest of your life," Alexander said when I asked of his interest in Café Momentum. "But that's the case for many kids. With Chad, we can expand and touch lives, and next thing you know, we've created something that has the ability to grow."

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The young men and women participating in the yearlong paid internship, upon release from detention, are the heartbeat of Café Momentum, the reason it exists after years of trying and failing and trying again. Some 750 people have worked for Cafe Momentum since its inception, and only a fraction of a fraction backslid — 15%, far below Texas' 42% re-incarceration rate. A recent Associated Press story estimated that Café Momentum "has saved Dallas taxpayers $30 million in its juvenile justice system."

So, yeah. You can see why everyone wants a Café Momentum in their city. They should want one on every block.

Like others who fell into his orbit, I met Houser in 2008, around the time D Magazine had pegged him as one of this city's rising culinary stars. At the time he was selling ice cream outside the Dallas Farmers Market, alongside the juvenile offenders he had taught to make the frozen dessert. He needed seven years and countless ice cream sales and pop-up dinners to transition from the downtown concrete to a single downtown storefront. Because doing this is hard.

But if expansion is at hand, at long last, Houser has not made a big deal of it. I only found out because of a YouTube video titled "A New Model for Juvenile Justice: Why a Pro-Football MVP Is Helping This Restaurant Go National," posted by Stand Together at the end of June. Only later did I discover that Stand Together is the poverty-fighting charity founded by Koch, the same industrialist who spent a sizable chunk of his $51-billion fortune throwing this country a Tea Party.

In recent years, Koch has begun to invest tens of millions of dollars in social entrepreneurs like Houser. Which means Koch is "infusing the work of private nonprofits with corporate principles and business management training," according to a June AP story about Koch's transition from politics to do-gooding. It also means he is giving money to nonprofits to reshape their operations and ready them for expansion, as well as pairing them with social entrepreneurs who want to do good but don't know with whom they should be doing it.

In Houser's case, that meant helping the chef form an advisory council; pairing him with Alexander; and giving Café Momentum around $700,000 in grant money to begin creating the umbrella organization that will give Houser the ability to realistically look outside the city limits for the first time.

"It was never the right time to expand," Houser said. "I am not going to take away from my kids in Dallas to do that. It's a losing proposition. I hear it all the time: 'Come here, come here, come here.' But we've been focused on making sure what were doing here is effective so that when we're in a position to expand, it doesn't hurt what we're doing in Dallas.

"Because at the end of the day," he said, "lives are at stake."

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