MISSOULA — More than one breakfast restaurant has recently announced its closure, leaving some in the Missoula community looking for a new brunch spot.
Très Bonne will be a new French-inspired restaurant downtown. The owners of Florabella are taking on the project, hoping to add something funky and unique to Missoula’s brunch scene.
Ben Burda co-owns Florabella with Drake Doepke. The restaurant has an Italian-inspired cuisine and a unique and colorful interior design and Burda plans to incorporate a similar eccentric aesthetic in his new restaurant.
“We took all the restraints off when we were doing the design to just make it feel funky, like no place you've been before,” he says. “It's going to be social, it's going to be lively. The music is going to be fun. The food's going to be eclectic.”
Très Bonne will sit in the same building that once held El Cazador, located on the corner of Higgins Avenue and Front Street. The interior will be “Miami-Deco” inspired, according to Burda, with features from local artists.
The windows in the space cover almost the entirety of the exterior walls, giving diners a wide view of the surrounding city.
“The view from inside the space is very much the feeling of being in the heart of Missoula,” Burda says. “We were able to really open up that space a lot with all new energy efficient windows that I'll open to the street, the clerestory windows up high. So when you're sitting in the space and you look up, you actually see all of the buildings around you, you see the mountains around you, and you really feel and have a sense of place for where you are.”
Burda grew up in the Mission Valley and went to college in Bozeman. Throughout school, he worked in the service industry and found a love for food and wine.
Burda now runs Florabella and Bar Plata. In all of his restaurants, he strives to pay his staff a livable wage for Missoula. He will continue this value in Très Bonne.
“For us, it's really important to do our best to take care of the people that take care of what we're doing, the service that we're putting into the community,” he says. “Whether it be you know, line cook or dishwasher, server or bartender, it's really important that those people get to live in the community that they call home with the increase of real estate… So for us to be able to keep the quality professionals that we employ, it is necessary for us to make sure that they make a living wage.”
The French New American cuisine, as Burda describes it, will include a variety of brunch cocktails and pastries, as well as breakfast classics like biscuits and gravy. They will use much of the same coffee recipes as seen at the Florabella café.
Burda calls the Missoula community a “brunch-starved” place and is happy to be able to contribute to changing that.
“It'll be a fun, new approach to social gathering during the day and I'm excited to see Missoula’s reception of that,” he says. “I'm really excited to see that corner open again and vibrant and thriving.”
Burda and Doepke have designed the restaurant to be community and environmentally-friendly, and plan to source a lot of food products locally.
“What gets me up in the morning obviously is to keep these places open and then hopefully thriving, and ultimately to leave the industry better than I found it,” Burda says. “That means redefining employment practices, that means redefining sourcing and addressing sustainability.”
The restaurant has been in the works for over a year, but the tentative opening date is November 1. Burda is expecting to open later than that.
“We're really excited to see the thing that's been in our head for a long time coming to fruition and be able to see a brunch starved community have a place to go during the day," Burda says.
