On your next night out at Florabella, why not let chef Charles Kuhnhofer and wine director Alcy Magana order for you?
Start with the farm cheese. “It’s our house-made ricotta, and you get the house-made focaccia that the baker comes in way too early in the morning to make,” Charles said. “You smear bread through the cheese and it’s a damn mess, but it’s the funnest thing to start a meal with here.”
For dessert, the richly textured chocolate budino with a glass of sparkling red lambrusco.
“A perfect pairing—one entices you to have more of the other,” Alcy said. “You can eat more of the budino because it’s not so sweet on your pallet—a lot of it is washed away by the acidity of the lambrusco. It feels like I’m in my raspberry patch and it just rained.”
It’s no accident that so much luscious flavor comes together at Florabella. They emphasize fresh, local, sustainable ingredients and made-from-scratch food.
“It makes it easy to be really enthusiastic about what we’re doing here, when the forager or farmer who sold it to me was wide-eyed telling me about the products,” Charles said.
“The biggest focus for us is to offer beautiful food, a beautiful dining experience, in a beautiful space in a beautiful neighborhood,” said co-owner and operator Ben Burda. “‘Bella’ is pretty, and ‘flora’ is flower. We’re this gem in the Rose Park neighborhood of the Garden City.”
Ben and Charles both mentioned prioritizing paying a living wage and offering benefits.
“The degree to which we try and take care of people is something I’ve not seen in many other places around town,” Charles said. “Everyone I have here is really excited to be on the clock, and you can taste it in the food.”
The restaurant also aims to be welcoming to everyone. Alcy said it’s important that the wine list showcase the diversity of Italian wine, at a variety of price points, while remaining approachable.
“Our goal is to take the average consumer and get them a little outside of what they think they like,” she said. “You don’t know anything about wine? We’re here to celebrate that with you.”
A particular little-known grape has been standing out to Alcy recently—Fiano di Avellino. “It has this waxy viscosity and a three to five minute finish—better than most chardonnays, and you’re getting so much more value than you ever would domestically,” she said.
“We also have non-alcoholic wine,” Alcy added. “You can drink it out of one of our bulbous glasses and have a sensory experience.”
The sensory experience of Florabella’s cuisine is matched by its visual appearance. One immediately striking thing about the interior is the large pink sculpture that hangs from the ceiling. Made of stainless steel cables and polycarbonate sheets that evoke calla lilies, it was designed by Virginia-based artist Kendall Buster, then built and installed by Wolf Magritte, a local industrial design firm that specializes in large-scale art and artifacts.
“It took a team of three or four of us close to a week to install it,” said Luke Boehnke, principal of Wolf Magritte. “A predefined grid that we installed on the ceiling had cables suspended from it, and then all of the points on that grid corresponded to individual strata on the sculpture, and all of those points were milled into the sculpture in advance. Most of the magic is in the planning.”
Beyond capturing the eye, the sculpture also functions to soften sound, brighten the space, and lower the eye line.
“We had an opportunity to start over,” said Ben, reflecting on the building’s previous incarnation as Caffe Dolce. “People mentioned it was very cavernous. It lacked intimacy. We wanted to bring it down to earth, and the flower deflects sound laterally across the space. It accomplished light as well—that piece of art makes the whole space illuminated but you’re not sure from where.”
In contrast to starting over on the inside, not much changed on the outside. “We wanted to honor the architecture,” said Ben. “Everyone says that’s a beautiful building.”
In the warmer months, the patio beckons and flower boxes are full to bursting. Cut flowers and live plants bring the outside in as you enter through the main door. The eye might be drawn to blue lights under the bar, or the warm pink and red tile accents on the floor, but it could take a couple visits before the average visitor notices the murals on the walls.
“You don’t want art to be too much the focal point, but it’s nice when people actually look at it,” said local artist Parker Beckley.
On the restaurant side, next to the open kitchen, a woman in a white dress gazes sultrily at the viewer, holding a smoking gun and a cigarette. “FLORABELLA” in yellow block letters pops against a bright red background.
“We thought, Florabella is probably a person, right?” Ben said. “You can decide if she is a villain or not.”
“This was a fun project because it started with a pun: spaghetti western,” Parker said, adding that pulp art was also an inspiration for the piece, while Ben mentioned that many elements of the space pay homage to Milan. “We wanted to make something that felt like it existed before, like you’d find it at an old barn out in the Italian countryside.”
On the cafe side, a pig stands on one foot on a cheese wheel, rolling down a slackline.
“He’s got a bottle of wine and it’s at least half gone,” Parker said, adding that the mural had been a late addition shortly before opening in late 2022. “I like the challenge of working in different styles, trying to match different vibes, especially in places like restaurants where they’re coming at you with a palette and different elements in mind. There’s no time for this to really be approved.”
“When you micromanage an artist, you’re going to get your version of their art, and what you’re paying for is their art,” Ben added. “I felt it was important to give him a little inspiration and let him go.”
Ben, who grew up in nearby St. Ignatius, acknowledged that challenging the status quo can inspire fear. “Missoula likes the way it is, and I like the way it is,” he said, noting that the restaurant adjusted course in response to early feedback. “We went from a little hoity-toity fancy in the beginning, and we learned what people want, which is maybe just a little simpler.”
“We’re restaurant people from Montana trying to make it a more livable place for us and everyone we know,” he went on. Ben was previously involved with opening Plonk (2013), Boxcar Bistro (2021), Bar Plata (2022) and Tres Bonne (2023), and his Florabella business partner Drake Doepke also opened SakeTome (2017) and Michi Ramen Bar (2018). “But we didn’t go on this wild journey to resurrect a beloved institution for ourselves. We did it for the community.”
“Missoula really can be a food town if the people are behind it,” he added.
“You can eat more of the budino because it’s not so sweet on your pallet—a lot of it is washed away by the acidity of the lambrusco." Alcy Magana
“We’re restaurant people from Montana trying to make it a more livable place for us and everyone we know." Ben Burda