Well, this is almost an accurate history. It’s close!

The Magnolia Cafe on Lake Austin Blvd began as the Omelettry West in 1979, opened by Ken Carpenter (owner of the Omelettry on Burnet Rd) and Kent Cole. 

The restaurant was always ready for fun. When the doors closed at 3 PM each day, the staff would, many times, stay into the evening working on homemade films, music videos in the kitchen, or making humorous staff glamour calendars. Sometimes on the busiest points of the rush on Saturday mornings, everyone would simply stop what they were doing for two minutes and sing the Omelettry theme song. 

Finally, in 1987, Kent bought out the remainder of the shareholder stock from Ken Carpenter, and it was time to rename the enterprise. Kent really wanted to name the restaurant Eddy's Westside Cafe, given the proximity to Deep Eddy (and also, Eddy is just sort of a cool-sounding-name, right?), but instead he and his wife, Diana Prechter, decided to name it supposedly after a diner they really loved in Louisiana, which, vaguely remembered, was some sort of nice tree flower - a magnolia maybe? Magnolia. Okay, so the diner he found out later was not a magnolia, it was the Camelia Grille, but that's okay. Magnolia Cafe it would be. He was committed to it being a place you could bring anyone, even your mom.

In February 1988, the Magnolia expanded to its location on South Congress. Story has it that the restaurant started staying open later and later each day until Kent or one of the managers or someone finally lost the keys, and that was that.

Since then, the restaurants were open 24 hours a day, 8 days a week, week after week after week.

When the threat of Covid-19 hit Austin, we had to make sudden re-calibrations. We quickly closed both restaurants temporarily before any mandate came through in order to protect our team and community from asymptomatic transmission, and we started taking a hard inventory of the business. Given a slow decline in sales for a few years consecutively at the Lake Austin location only, we realized our beloved original location would not be able to weather the massive uncertainty of the time to come. So, to preserve the enterprise as a whole, we let go of our Lake Austin location. The outpouring of love and tears we received (and experienced) from that loss was overwhelming — seeing and hearing the memories all of you created there for years building your families and friendships in deep ways for generations in our booths was such a powerful testament to what we had tried to do, and we are so grateful we got to do it with all y’all for so long. And now, looking towards the future, we’re focusing on the vibrancy of South Congress and slowly figuring out what it means to operate as safely as possible given our global circumstances, bringing back as much of our team as we’re able to with the classics you know and love.

With that said, thank you Austin, for so many years of love and support. Because of you we hope we can stand by our motto -- Everybody knows, Everybody goes.

Want more photos to go along with this story? Check out these gems.