“Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you if you have faith the size of a mustard seed you will say this to the mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you,” Matthew 17:20.

This text not only inspired but help create El Paso’s own Mustard Seed Cafe. This pay-what-you-can cafe is a restaurant that provides healthy and delicious meals to people of El Paso regardless of their ability to pay by using local and organic produce, and any helping hands that are willing.

“Well we are a pay what you can cafe and this term and kind of cafe is popping up and there are about 34 or 35 in the nation,” founder Shelly Speicher said , “And what we do, is that if you don’t have a lot of money you pay what you can for your meal. We have a suggested price and you can pay below it or above it. And if you can’t pay anything at all then we ask you to volunteer for an hour.”

This idea originally came to mind when Christi Brown, Patsy Burdick, and Shelly Speicher wanted to make a positive impact on the community by helping people feed themselves and their families. After the the idea came to them they started to recruit more helpful hands to help them organize cook and anything in between.

“Having the desire to do something for the community, we started to look for others who love El Paso as much as we do. We started to look for volunteers who could specialize in anything or just wanted to help,” Speicher said.

After finding people to help out like Roman Wilcox as the chef and Peggy lewis as the manager. They opened up their cafe in December and it wasn’t long before they started to get some business on their short working period of Wednesday through Friday from 11-2.

“One thing that happened in the beginning when we opened, was that a man came in and volunteered for a meal and he said he enjoyed working, and that’s what we are here for to earn a healthy and nutritious meal with dignity”

Speicher said that the cafe hopes to fix all the problems to open up the cafe for five days a week and later start to serve breakfast and dinner.