Austin’s Blanton Museum Has a New Muse in Café Fleurs de Nuit
Blanton Museum director Simone Wicha and Justine’s Brasserie founder Justine Gilcrease are making space for Austin’s creative community to stay awhile
Simone Wicha and Justine Gilcrease have built their careers in different worlds, but the parallels quickly emerge. Both are fiercely independent, share a passionate belief in the power of creativity and have spent years creating spaces where art isn’t something to look at, but something to experience.
This fall, those sensibilities converged at Café Fleurs de Nuit, Gilcrease’s French café and bar at the Blanton Museum of Art, where Wicha has served as director for 15 years. The partnership feels fitting for two women who have each built their careers around the potential of place — what it can inspire, invite and make possible.
Converging paths
Wicha, who grew up in Mexico City and studied math before pursuing a career in the arts at The University of Texas at Austin, worked at the Noguchi Museum and The Juilliard School in New York before returning to Austin. At the Blanton, she has helped transform not just the museum but the way visitors experience it. Its redesigned grounds recall the gardens and public spaces of Mexico City that invite people to gather, wander and explore.
SHOP
Gilcrease took an equally unconventional path to hospitality, studying illustration and photography before entering the restaurant business. At Justine’s Brasserie, her artistic instincts translated into a restaurant where food, music, fashion and design contribute to the unpredictable chemistry of the room.
“It’s not just a restaurant,” Gilcrease said. “I’ve done everything in my power to make it art.”
When Wicha returned to Austin from around the time Justine’s opened, it immediately felt like part of the creative community she was looking for. “Justine looks at everything like an artist,” Wicha said. “Her restaurant’s almost like a performance art piece.”
So, when the Blanton began searching for a local partner for its new café, Gilcrease seemed an obvious choice. Wicha wanted more than a concession for museum visitors; she wanted a gathering place that would complete the grounds. Gilcrease stood out not only for what she had created at Justine’s, but for her reverence for the museum and its artists.
The design
Global architecture firm Snøhetta redesigned the Blanton’s grounds, while Joel Mozersky — known for designing Austin restaurants Uchi and Uchiko and San Antonio’s Brasserie Mon Chou Chou and Pullman Market — created the café’s interior. Inspired by French modernism, classic brasseries and artist hangouts like La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Café Fleurs de Nuit layers mirrored walls and ceilings, cherry-red leather banquettes and gleaming brass against cool white marble. Its name meaning “night-blooming flowers,” Café Fleurs de Nuit opens onto a botanical patio overlooking Carmen Herrera’s “Petals,” with views of the Texas State Capitol and Ellsworth Kelly’s stained-glass chapel “Austin.”
Justine’s chef Manuel Rocha has created a French bistro menu suited to leisurely daytime meals, espresso between classes and portable items to take onto the museum grounds. Gilcrease’s favorite breakfast — a soft-boiled egg with house-cured salmon and crème fraîche — joins peppery steak au poivre, buttery loup de mer meunière, silky beef carpaccio and oeufs mayonnaise with sandwiches and picnic-ready fare. A French-leaning wine list and a coffee program from Austin’s Figure 8 Coffee Purveyors round out the beverage offerings.
Stay awhile
Gilcrease wants the accessibility of the great Parisian brasseries, where beauty doesn’t have to signal exclusivity. She imagines students lingering over espresso, museumgoers settling in after an exhibition and Austinites stopping by for a Boursin omelette and martini without ever entering a gallery.
“People think if it’s beautiful and fancy, it inherently has to be expensive or unattainable, and that’s just not true,” Gilcrease said. “Look at every gorgeous brasserie in Paris, where students and artists lounge for hours. I’m trying to create something that is inclusive, lovely and wholesome.”
That mirrors Wicha’s larger ambition for the Blanton. Rather than simply seeing art and returning quickly to the outside world, she wants visitors to stay awhile — to leave inspired, relaxed or expanded. Café Fleurs de Nuit extends that experience into the evening on Saturdays, with exhibition openings, readings, special events and themed menus offering more reasons to stay awhile. It also speaks to something both women want to preserve as Austin grows: its creative soul.
“You do that by creating spaces that (artists and creatives) want to hang out in,” Gilcrease said. “And making sure it’s personal, real and soulful — not corporate.”
The result is Café Fleurs de Nuit: a place where art, food, drink and music offer every reason to gather, settle in and lose track of time.
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