Two Magnolias Café and Catering

Most people have been inside the Art Museum of Southeast Texas and never noticed the restaurant. That might be the most Beaumont thing possible about Two Magnolias Café and Catering.

Becky Burleson has been feeding the downtown lunch crowd and catering weddings across the Golden Triangle from inside the museum at 500 Main Street for over fifteen years. Her regulars call her Granny, a name that followed her from her years serving students at St. Anthony, and it stuck the way names do when they are earned.

The menu shifts. Monday through Friday the lunch buffet moves from traditional American to Cajun to Asian-inspired to Italian, depending on the day. The walls change too. Rotating artwork from Southeast Texas artists means no two visits look quite the same. You come for the food and leave having seen something.

But the detail that makes Two Magnolias more than just a lunch spot is what happens every summer. For more than two decades Burleson has hosted cooking camps for Beaumont children inside the museum, teaching them to make everything from breakfast burritos to peach pie. She started the tradition at her previous restaurant, The Green Beanery, and brought it with her when she moved to Two Magnolias. The camps kept running. The kids kept coming.