Favorite Tri-Cities brunch spot is moving and expanding its menu
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Café Magnolia will relocate March 1 to The Falls, a retail-residential complex.
- New space expands kitchen, seating, bakery and adds pizza oven and events.
- The Falls mixes 107 apartments and street retail; project now nearly fully leased.
Café Magnolia, the popular Kennewick spot for brunch and baked goods with a European flair, will move into a new space around the corner on March 1.
Café Magnolia’s husband-and-wife owners, Nena (Cosic) and Chad Langford, will move their business to the newly opened retail-residential complex, The Falls, in the Southridge area.
The new spot is around the corner from the current Café Magnolia at Cynergy Centre, near Union Avenue and 27th Avenue.
The couple initially planned to move this fall to another new building in the growing 24th Avenue neighborhood. When that deal fell through, they found a new destination that Nena said better suits their dream of building a bigger business.
“The Falls is a better fit for us,” she said.
Its future home is about 4,300 square feet, or four times the size of its current spot.
The new space will boast more seating and an expansive kitchen that accommodates a bigger menu, including a pizza oven and a bakery to continue preparing the pastries and European desserts she’s known for.
There will be space for private events and more room to support catering.
Apartments and more
The Falls, developed by Elite Construction + Development, arguably is Kennewick’s first modern project to mix both residential and commercial uses on the same property.
The residential component includes 107 apartments, which are more than 70% leased. The commercial component includes for-rent storage units and a row of street-level retail spots.
With Café Magnolia on board, the project is almost fully leased with only one 1,600-square-foot spot left, said Trini Garibay, Elite’s CEO.
Garibay called Café Magnolia a perfect complement to a lineup that already includes a barber shop, Smooth N Slice café and a pizza shop under construction.
His wife, Brenda Garibay of SVN, is the leasing broker. She long wanted to bring Café Magnolia to the property.
“They will activate the space like no one else,” Garibay said. The Garibays hope to attract a market, salon or fitness studio to the last vacant space.
Elite will build the restaurant, which is designed with a French country vibe. The project includes a new kitchen, bakery and an expansive patio.
Café Magnolia will offer full lunch and brunch service from 8 a.m.-2 p.m. daily at 4112 W. 24th Ave.
Sundays are the busiest day of the week for the café, with guests braving lines and parking shortages to dine there. Nena Langford said she’s eager to better serve customers with more seating.
And it won’t have to pivot from breakfast items to brunch, as it does now with its limited kitchen space.
Cooking up growth
Whether a customer wants a cabbage roll at 8 a.m. or Eggs Benedict at 1, the café will be able to accommodate.
Nena Langford began as a caterer, building her business on family recipes from her native Bosnia. She worked out of Red Mountain Kitchen in downtown Kennewick before the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2020, she teamed with winemaker Victor Palencia to open Culture Shock Bistro, a food truck that united her European background with his Mexican heritage at the Port of Kennewick’s Columbia Gardens Wine & Artisan Village in downtown Kennewick.
In 2022, she and her then-fiance ventured out on their own, opening Café Magnolia in the former Koko’s Bartini space in the Cynergy Centre.
She said they knew almost immediately that they would quickly outgrow the space, conceived as a small amenity on the ground-floor of a traditional office building.
She credits customers in the Southridge area with propelling Café Magnolia forward and said she would never entertain moving outside the area.
Follow Café Magnolia on Facebook.
This story was originally published October 30, 2025 at 5:00 AM.