The Florence Building has always been hard to miss. Seven stories of terra cotta and rose-colored concrete curve around the corner of North Higgins Avenue, with glass block windows that look nothing like anything else downtown. It went up in 1941 on a site that had already burned down twice, first in 1913 and again in 1936, each time as a hotel built for railroad travelers passing through a much younger Missoula. The building people see today is the third attempt, and for most of the last decade it's been easier to admire from the sidewalk than to actually walk into.
That's because the ground floor kept losing tenants. The space that once held the Red Bird wine bar's kitchen and fine-dining room later became Second Set Bistro, then sat quiet again. Upstairs, the building had settled into life as an office block with a ballroom that got booked for the occasional wedding. An out-of-state owner bought the property in October 2018 and started renovating the lobby in 2019, but even a freshened-up lobby doesn't pull people off Higgins Avenue on its own.
This year it did. Three separate business owners, none of them coordinating with each other, chose the Florence Building as the place to open something new in 2026. That's not a coincidence worth a shrug. It's the clearest evidence in Missoula right now that downtown's food and drink scene isn't just adding restaurants, it's filling back into buildings that sat half-used for years, and the Florence is the building where you can see all three stages of that process happening under one roof at the same time.
A Chef Who Waited a Decade for This Space
Sumac Cafe opened inside the Florence this spring, on May 20, and if the name behind it sounds familiar to longtime residents, it should. Chef Abe Risho grew up in a Missoula restaurant family. His father, Ray Risho, ran Emmaus Road in the 1970s and later opened Perugia Old World Cooking with his teenage sons. Abe, his brother Sam, and Sam's wife Elise went on to open Silk Road on the Hip Strip in 2009, a restaurant that closed in 2016 and that plenty of Missoulians still bring up unprompted. Abe has said he'd been planning a restaurant like this since before Silk Road even closed, which means this fast-casual Mediterranean breakfast and lunch spot, built with his wife Caitlin along with Runn and Sasha Vermel and Ryan Nicodemus, is the product of roughly a decade of waiting for the right room.
The room he found is the old Red Bird space, tucked behind an entrance in the alley and a second, harder-to-spot entry near the Florence's indoor lobby. Sumac runs breakfast Tuesday through Friday from 8 to 11, lunch from 11 to 3, and weekend brunch Saturday and Sunday from 9 to 2, with an in-house bakery turning out pita, sourdough, and za'atar pretzel buns throughout the week. The menu leans into dishes downtown hadn't had in one place before: shakshuka, savory crepes, rotisserie chicken bowls, and a slow-cooked hawaij lamb.
The Lobby Came First, Then the Bar
Sumac isn't the only thing that changed inside the Florence this cycle. After the 2019 renovation, the building's lobby reopened as Historic Florence Cocktails & Coffee, giving the ground floor a gathering space it hadn't had in years. Now the old wine bar space, next door to Sumac, is being converted into Shapes Hi-Fi, a listening bar run by local musician Mark Chumrau and modeled on the jazz kissa cafes that trace back to post-war Japan, the kind of intimate rooms built around vinyl records and high-end sound systems rather than a full kitchen. Between the lobby, the cafe, and the incoming bar, three different owners have now placed three different bets on the same 85-year-old building, the most reinvestment the Florence has seen at once since it stopped being a hotel.
This Isn't the Building's First Comeback, and It Isn't the City's Only One
Missoula has run this exact play before, just in a different part of town. When developers Leslie and Ed Wetherbee built out the Old Sawmill District five years ago, they anchored the ground floor of Polleys Square with Boxcar Bistro, a French restaurant styled after an old Orient Express dining car, and Dog & Bicycle, a daytime breakfast and lunch spot that shares Boxcar's kitchen. That pairing turned a new residential development into a neighborhood people actually visit, and it's the same formula now playing out at the Florence: a historic or newly built structure, a chef-owned restaurant that gives it a reason to open the door, and a second business filling in around it.
The rest of downtown has been filling in too, mostly in smaller storefronts that don't get the same attention as a seven-story landmark but add up to the same pattern over the past year and a half:
- M-80 Chicken left its longtime spot as a food truck fixture at Kettlehouse's Myrtle Street Taphouse for its own downtown storefront in 2025, serving its final truck meal that May before setting up permanently.
- Ragheef, the Middle Eastern restaurant Missoulians already knew from its original location, opened a second spot at 1900 South Russell Street this year.
- Zootown Sweets, a new candy shop, and 3B Bagels, which opened at 403 North Higgins, both filled downtown storefronts earlier this year.
None of these openings is as dramatic on its own as a landmark building filling back in, but together they say the same thing the Florence does: downtown's ground-floor vacancies are closing faster than they're opening.
The Farm Version of the Same Story
The same appetite for new gathering places shows up outside downtown, too, just on farmland instead of a historic block. The Missoula Fall Fest ran its first season in 2025 at Grass Valley Farms on Mullan Road, six weekends of corn maze, hay slides, and a barrel train that organizers built because, as one of them put it at the time, nothing like it existed here yet. For 2026, the festival is coming back for seven weekends including Halloween, an extra weekend added in its second year rather than trimmed, which is the kind of expansion that only happens when a first attempt actually draws a crowd. Grass Valley Farms sits at 5280 Deschamps Lane west of the city, and the same instinct that filled the Florence Building's ground floor this year is the instinct that turned a single-season pop-up into a returning, growing tradition on the edge of town.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
None of this requires a decision from you. You don't need to be house-hunting to notice that the alley entrance you've walked past for years finally has a reason to use it, or that the corn maze that popped up on Mullan Road last fall just got a seventh weekend this time around. What it does mean is that the texture of daily life here changed measurably this year, not through one big announcement but through several small owners betting on the same handful of buildings and open fields at roughly the same time. That's usually a better signal of where a neighborhood is heading than any single ribbon-cutting.
Keeping track of those signals, block by block and season by season, is exactly the kind of local read that shapes good real estate advice, whether you're watching your own street or just curious what's happening a few blocks over. If you'd ever like to talk through what any of this means for a property you own or one you're watching, Cameron Hahn is always glad to help. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
