A restaurant on Lower Greenville is ready and willing to fry your turkey for free: Medium Rare, the upscale prix fixe steak frites chain with locations in nine cities including Dallas at 5631 Alta Ave., is expanding its Free Turkey Fry event to its restaurant in Dallas.

The chain has been hosting this event at its original location in Washington DC for 18 years. According to a release, for the first time, this holiday season they will host the turkey fry at other locations.

The Medium Rare Free Turkey Fry event was founded in 2008, by the restaurant’s co-founder Mark Bucher, who is a passionate voice on hunger, food insecurity, and real-world, scalable solutions.

He launched the event as a way to help those who wanted to avoid the hassles and potential dangers of turkey frying. Many who took advantage of the event were recipients of free turkeys but lacked the skill, confidence, or tools to cook them.

The expansion of this year’s Free Turkey Fry into Dallas, as well as into two additional cities (Houston and Boston), reflects both the program’s growth and the increasing need for community support surrounding the growing issue of food insecurity in the current economic and political climate.

“We’ve seen the growing need to expand the Free Turkey Fry event year after year,” Bucher says. “It’s great to provide food to those that are struggling to make ends meet, but we often don’t think about how they are going to cook the food."

As an offshoot of the Free Turkey Fry program, they launched "Feed the Fridge" during the pandemic, placing community refrigerators across DC, and paying local restaurants to fill them with ready-to-eat chef-prepared meals. That program has provided more than one million free meals and injected more than $2 million back into neighborhood restaurants.

Dallas’ Medium Rare Free Turkey Fry will take place on Thanksgiving Day from 11 am-4 pm, and is open to anyone who brings a fully thawed turkey, up to 10 pounds.

The event will operate on a first-come, first-serve basis, but Bucher says they will try to get to everyone. They're expecting to fry hundreds of turkeys in Dallas and encourage people to arrive early; at their DC events, lines begin forming around 8 am.

This year’s national expansion underscores both the scalability of community-driven solutions and Medium Rare’s long-standing mission to fight hunger and food insecurity with creativity, compassion, and action.

"If we can help a family enjoy Thanksgiving safely, and at the same time help another family eat with dignity through Feed the Fridge, then we’re doing what Medium Rare was built to do," Bucher says.