Magnolia Bistro is closing Credit: File: Katie Jickling
Magnolia Bistro announced Thursday morning on its Facebook page that it is “closing its doors in Burlington.” The restaurant at 1 Lawson Lane, which served breakfast and lunch, added that it is “actively seeking investors to lift us to a new city somewhere between South Burlington and Key West.”

The restaurant’s closing comes months after Magnolia owner Shannon Reilly posted profanity-laced comments on Facebook  about people with addiction issues and the city’s efforts to address the health issue.

“The junkies should detox or die,” he wrote. “Sorry. So fuckin pathetic employing people spaced out on bupe. Fuckin useless. Let them die.”

The comments elicited calls on social media to boycott the restaurant. Reilly later deleted the posts and he told Seven Days he regretted what he’d written.

The locked restaurant door Credit: Sally Pollak
Reilly, who opened the bistro in 2006, also had a long-running feud with the Burlington Farmers Market, which operates across the street from his restaurant in City Hall Park on summer and fall Saturdays.

The Burlington Free Press first reported the restaurant’s closure.

A call to Magnolia Thursday morning returned a recorded message saying the number is “temporarily unavailable,” and the café’s door was locked. An attempted delivery notice dated September 4 was stuck in the door handle. The item, addressed to Reilly, was from Burlington law firm Gravel & Shea.

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Sally Pollak was a staff writer at Seven Days from 2017 until she retired in summer 2023. She started as a Food contributor before transitioning to the Arts & Culture team. Her first newspaper job was compiling horse racing results at the Philadelphia...

7 replies on “Burlington’s Magnolia Bistro Shuts Down”

  3. What took so long? KARMA Reilly…..enjoy Key West- maybe you get a trump to back you somewhere far away from here

  5. Not sure what’s up here, I dumped facebook after they decided which opinions were “allowable ” and which weren’t.
    apparently he just said what everyone was thinking, Including other junkies.
    Addiction is a disease, it’s not a substance disease, (well not only a substance disease), it’s a disease of dis-connection from the world, from friends, from the local society, from one’s self.
    And surprise surprise, it’s epidemic these days, or just out in the open.
    when a guy just trying to make a business run, apparently paying substandard pay, otherwise he have a better class of people to chose from to hire,
    when he complains it should open up dialogue, not be forced to move,
    or as in facebook, silence them…
    after all, addiction is a disease of separation, of not belonging.

  7. What goes around comes around. Businesses addicted to low-wage jobs should die. Good riddance. (ps -did anyone else laugh out loud at the irony of an alcohol purveyor decrying addiction?)

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