Meet Leonardo Alvarez, who spent much of his youth, as he puts it, “dealing dope,” which landed him in Dallas’ Youth Village. He’s been through the Café Momentum program, and in the video above, by KERA’s Dane Walters, he talks about his girlfriend’s pregnancy, his legal stumbles and his struggle to stay on the straight and narrow.

Café Momentum has some of the hardest tables to book in Dallas. The once a month pop-up dinners sell out fast at $100  a plate. They’re held at hot restaurants around the city. They feature gourmet menus, top-notch table service and high-profile chefs who work side-by-side with eight kids who provide an unexpected twist to the evening. They are all incarcerated at a Dallas County juvenile detention center.

KERA FM’s Jacqueline Fellows prepared this report.

• Listen to the story that aired on KERA FM:

• Online version:

As restaurant guests start to quiet down, Janice Provost, co-founder of Café Momentum, stands proudly near the front doors wearing a bright pink chef’s coat and an equally bright smile.

“Welcome to Café Momentum, our 14th dinner!” she says.

It’s the 14th sold-out dinner for Café Momentum – this time, at CampO, an Oak Cliff restaurant that’s now known as Outpost American Tavern. The young men cooking and serving the dinner have recently completed a four-week culinary class at Dallas County’s Youth Village juvenile detention center. The center houses non-violent juvenile offenders between the ages of 13 and 17. This group has been looking forward to tonight. It’s a chance to leave the detention center. And they’ll be paid $10 an hour.

The boys are nervous, excited, and working.

Dinner’s ready at Cafe Momentum. Photo: Dane Walters.

In CampO’s kitchen, a large fan cools down the small space where four chefs and four students from Youth Village are prepping food. 17-year old Devontae is cutting small pickled gherkins for the first appetizer: pork cheek terrine with cornichon. It’s the first time he’s heard of a cornichon, but he likes it.

“It’s delicious, I like trying new things,” says Devontae. “I think this part is really simple – I mean, I could do this for a living, definitely.”

Devontae typifies the city’s juvenile detention center population. He’s 17, a minority, and poor. He’s in Youth Village for violating probation on a gun charge and for evading arrest.

These kids have committed serious crimes. They’re on a dangerous path that Chris Quadri knows and wants to reverse.  Quadri is the executive director for Youth Village Resources, the nonprofit organization that pays for the culinary class that leads to Café Momentum.

“I spent seven years in a penitentiary for something I did when I was 19 years old, just older than these guys, many of these guys. I was selling drugs and somebody tried to rob me and I defended myself and found myself in prison.”

Now 36 with a successful career and a wife,  Quadri has left prison far behind and wants to show these kids they can do the same with their troubled past.

“They are not their mistake,” says Quadri. “They are not an action they may have made. They have this huge potential, and everybody for the last couple of years has treated them as that mistake. If we’re able to get them to forget that, to then focus on the good things in their life, then they become new people.”

Quadri says the first step to giving kids like Devontae a way out of crime and poverty is job training. And that training starts back at the Youth Village in the culinary program. It’s one of seven job skills classes offered at the detention center. The boys learn how to cook simple, healthy meals for $10 or less. Culinary Arts director Charles Plummer runs the class. Today, he’s showing the group how to make vegetable quesadillas.

Charles Plummer teaches Youth Village residents to cook quesadillas. Photo: Dane Walters.

Plummer does not baby these kids. He talks them through every process from rinsing black beans to handling a knife. He watches the boys closely, and steps in when needed.

“Let me show you how to do that man,” Plummer says, grabbing a vegetable peeler. “You want to take long strokes.”

To work at Café Momentum, the boys must take this class. When they complete it, they’ll have skills for restaurant work and that could help get them a job when they’re released. Only the eight best students will be picked for Café Momentum.

A recent study found that 73% of kids who completed a class while serving time at Youth Village were employed a year after being released. Only 20% of offenders who didn’t take a class had jobs.

Co-founder Chad Houser says other data also supports Café Momentum’s success.

“You know, when you look at … just statistically the state recidivism rate being 50-percent for juvenile offenders, and then astonishingly the young men that are completing these pre-release programs, the recidivism rate is 12%, that’s [a] 38% decrease, that’s enormous.”

Having a room full of people cheering you on at a Cafe Momentum dinner; a chance to forget about the crime that landed you in juvenile detention sounds pretty great, right? Well, yes, but some of the kids, like 16-year old Eric, don’t trust that a group of total strangers is rooting for him to succeed. Eric is part of the group working in the kitchen. And it’s almost time to rotate with the group waiting tables. But he doesn’t want to work the front of the house.

“Yeah, I want to stay back here,” says Eric.  “I don’t want to go up there. I’m scared. You don’t even know them, they gonna be lookin’ at you like, ehhh.”

Eric gets a pep talk from Taurus, a Café Momentum graduate. Taurus served time in the Youth Village. He’s an example of how this program can work. He’s been working off and on, and is still off of probation. He returns tonight to mentor the kids.

“They don’t want to know what you done in the past,” Taurus tells Eric. “They want to know what you gonna do in the future. It’s a proud moment. They all clap for you and stuff like that. I felt, I felt important. I felt real important.”

The folks behind Café Momentum hope that feeling of being important sticks because as great as this one night is for the boys, the real world challenges of poverty, broken families, and difficult choices, are still there when they get out.