Best of Tucson 1996: Best Café Experience

Best Café Experience

Café Magritte
254 E. Congress St.

ALTHOUGH IT MIGHT be a distant memory to some, we can remember a time when the downtown area seemed relegated to an urban slag heap. One after one, businesses closed shop and moved to the malls and, in the wake of this merchant exodus, downtown Tucson dwindled to a shadow of its former self.

Fortunately, there were those visionaries who saw their way clear to another day, a day when the downtown area would once again be alive with the sights, sounds and smells of creative energy.

True, there would be art galleries, theaters and studios galore, but to help sustain this emerging cultural scene there would have to be a special place for people to gather and exchange ideas. A place where people could feed their bodies as well as their souls. A place that embodied the new enthusiasm of downtown, which was apparent everywhere you looked in the mid-eighties.

No one understood this imperative for café society better than Camille Bonzani and Dave Elliott, friends and fellow artists who spent a good deal of their free time hanging out in cafés and knew what constituted a good one.

"We were café addicts," recalls Bonzani. "Over many conversations an idea took shape that downtown needed a good café that could get hooked into this new aesthetic, this art underworld."

Bonzani says that their conversations often turned to a discussion of whether the two of them could pull off such a café concept. Having both worked in the restaurant industry before, they had no illusions about the amount of work that would be involved; but somehow, the labor and long hours didn't frighten them.

"In the restaurant business, you're either in it or your not," says Bonzani. "I guess it comes down to a strong belief in the value of social comfort."

A short time later, the two learned that an older, newly renovated downtown building was available. "Once we saw that building (Magritte's present home), what could we do?" asks Bonzani with a laugh. "We had to say yes."

The rest, as they say, is history.

If there's a hub to the downtown dining scene, Magritte's is it. Warm, gracious service, food bursting with flavor, and a lofty space of polished wood, used brick and high ceilings make this a popular choice for all dining occasions.

Magritte's has undergone many changes and, while not necessarily bad in themselves, many of these created incredible strains on the business.

"We had a kind of artistic epiphany around the time the Bowler Room was added," says Bonzani. "We didn't know how to handle what it was we had, especially from a managerial perspective. We were in danger of losing the joy of doing the thing."

Since then, things have stabilized and Bonzani, who now runs the restaurant solo, says Magritte's is a restaurant that has come fully into its own.

No more is there a feeling that the restaurant needs to become anything other than what it already is--a place of urbane ambiance, charm and extraordinary food.

--Rebecca Cook