Rock Springs Cafe shut its doors for good on June 30. It had sat inside the Rock Springs Building at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden since 2019, pouring coffee and building lunch plates for a steady stream of garden visitors who wanted something to eat between the rose collection and the Japanese Garden. That building has been standing since 1934, when the Botanic Garden first opened as the oldest one in Texas, and for a few months this fall it’s going to sit quiet while a full renovation happens inside it.
What comes out the other side is called Flora House, and the name change is doing more work than it looks like on paper.
The kitchen belongs to chef Juan Rodriguez, a partner at Westland Hospitality, the Fort Worth group that also runs Margie’s Italian Gardens, Pulido’s Kitchen & Cantina, JD’s Hamburgers, Curly’s Frozen Custard, and Westland Gardens. Rodriguez already leads the food side of Westland’s catering business, Magdalena’s, and earlier this year he picked up “Most Creative Dish” at the Fort Worth Zoo’s Beastro event. His wife, Paige Rodriguez, is running the guest experience and events side of the new restaurant, which is how a lot of husband-and-wife restaurant pairs in this town actually divide the work, even when only one name ends up on the press release.
Rodriguez has said the food philosophy traces back to his grandmother, and he’s been quoting her directly in interviews: full bellies, happy hearts. It’s a plain enough line, but it tells you the menu isn’t going to lean on trend-chasing. Expect breakfast and lunch built around what the garden itself is growing that week, plus wraps, small plates, dips, and a charcuterie program, along with an in-house bread operation and desserts made on site.
The part worth circling on your calendar is the Secret Garden Supper Club, a ticketed, prix-fixe dinner series Rodriguez is bringing over from the format Magdalena’s already runs. These aren’t going to be regular dinner service. They’re the kind of one-off events where the chef comes out and talks through the menu, and if Westland’s other supper clubs are any indication, they’ll sell out fast once dates go up.
One detail that matters for anyone who’s visited the old Rock Springs Cafe before: that spot required a paid Garden admission to get inside. Flora House won’t. It’s opening to the general public, which turns what used to be a captive-audience lunch counter into an actual Fort Worth restaurant that happens to sit inside 120 acres of gardens.
Westland is also taking over as the Botanic Garden’s exclusive catering partner, handling weddings, corporate events, and private parties on the grounds going forward. That’s an expansion on top of an expansion. The group is separately in the middle of turning the old Roy Pope Grocery building into a new concept that will keep the Roy Pope name, so this is a company having a genuinely big year, not a single restaurant opening in isolation.
No opening date has been locked in yet. Every source close to the project, including the Botanic Garden itself, is saying fall 2026 and nothing more specific. Renovations started right after the June 30 closure, so a September or October debut lines up with a typical buildout timeline, but that’s an estimate, not a confirmed date, and it’s worth calling the Garden directly before you plan around it.
For now, the Rock Springs Building sits behind construction, and the Fort Worth Botanic Garden’s dining page is the best place to watch for updates as they land. When Flora House opens, it’ll be the rare Fort Worth restaurant where the menu changes with the season because the ingredients are growing right outside the window.
