Tahoe City's Newest Restaurants Are Chasing Its Oldest Buildings

Jake's on the Lake held its deck-opening party on June 12 this year, the kind of event that used to be an afterthought here. Sunset views, live music, the unofficial cannonball into a season that everyone assumed would happen the way it always had. Except this year, the invitation carried a different weight. A lease standoff with the property's ownership group had already forced the restaurant to close for the winter, and the stakes go beyond one lease. Boatworks Mall, where Jake's has operated since 1978, is also the subject of a longer-running redevelopment plan that would eventually replace the mall, the Inn at Boatworks and the neighboring bank branch with a mixed-use project built around hotel rooms, a spa and residential condominiums, a plan still moving through Placer County review. Any demolition tied to that project would also have to clear a Tahoe Regional Planning Agency dig moratorium that runs from mid-October through spring, the kind of regulatory timing that can push a redevelopment back a full extra year almost by accident. Jake's reopened anyway, for what its own managing partners are calling its final summer. New chef Ronnie Miranda, a Culinary Institute of America graduate from Oakland, took over the kitchen. Midweek happy hours went up to pull in locals rather than just visitors passing through. The plan, as of now, is to stay open through the end of October, though the timeline could still move.

Forty-eight years on the water, and the town doesn't know yet whether this is a comeback season or a farewell tour.

Meanwhile, three of the most talked-about restaurant openings in Tahoe City over the past two years have nothing to do with new construction. They are all restorations. That is not a coincidence worth glossing over. It is the story of what is actually happening to this town's dining scene right now, and it says something about the place that a scroll through restaurant reviews will not.

The town is rebuilding around its oldest bones

Savoie opened on July 1 in the old Pfeiffer House building at the west entrance to town. The Pfeiffer House had served German fare, schnitzel, escargot, the whole traditional alpine menu, since 1939. It closed in 2019 and sat vacant while chefs Mark and Alison Sullivan spent six years restoring the space. Mark trained in Michelin-starred kitchens and, as a young cook, worked at PlumpJack in Olympic Valley when it first opened, an experience he has credited with pulling him back to the region years later. Alison's background is in regional French cuisine. Together they are serving French and Italian-inspired alpine food inside a building that has been feeding this town, in one form or another, for close to ninety years.

Then there is evo Hotel and its restaurant, Sierra Surf Club, which opened in March of last year inside the historic Tahoe Inn, a structure built around 1876 that operated as a real speakeasy during Prohibition and functioned for decades as something close to an unofficial town hall. That building had been dark since 2022, when Blue Agave closed after a 27-year run there. Now it houses a restaurant led by chef Billy McCullough, previously of Dragonfly Restaurant and Sushi Bar in Truckee, under a project curated by pro snowboarder and Truckee local Jeremy Jones. Every dollar of profit from Sierra Surf Club goes to Protect Our Winters, the climate nonprofit Jones founded.

Neither of these is a ground-up build. Both are old, storied buildings that had been empty for years, brought back with new operators and new menus but the same walls. If you are looking for a pattern in Tahoe City's restaurant scene right now, that is it: the town is not expanding outward. It is reoccupying its own history.

The smaller bet: Minglewood

Not every reopening needs a Prohibition-era backstory. Minglewood, a breakfast and lunch café that opened last year, moved into the space that used to be Syd's Bagels. The owner is Alex Looby, who already runs Christy Hill and the Sandbar, meaning this is a known local operator putting money into a fourth spot rather than an outside group testing the market. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Shoulder seasons here are brutal on businesses that do not already understand the rhythm of a town that empties out between Labor Day and the first good snow. Chris Taylor, general manager of Press + Pour and the adjacent Tahoe Tap Haus, put it plainly when he talked about the choice locals make every week to support smaller places instead of defaulting to whatever is easiest. Press + Pour and Tahoe Tap Haus were also said to be planning a rebrand around this time, itself a quiet signal that even the businesses that made it through the lean years are still adjusting.

What is still just a hole in the ground

For contrast, it is worth knowing what has not opened. The Tahoe City Lodge project, on the site where the old Hendrickson building was torn down back in 2019, is still an empty lot. Developer Samir Tuma of Kila Tahoe says the project is tracking, pointing to progress restoring 1.7 acres of stream environment on the Tahoe City golf course and concrete work laying the groundwork for future construction. He is targeting significant construction activity sometime in 2026, citing recovering capital markets and stabilizing construction costs. That is the more cautious, corporate side of development here, the kind that gets announced years before it gets built.

Set that against Savoie and evo, both of which eventually turned long-vacant historic buildings into finished, functioning restaurants under independent owners, even after years of sitting dark. The smaller, independently backed projects got open. The bigger, more heavily financed one is still pouring concrete. That is not a knock on the Lodge, which faces its own legal and financing hurdles that have nothing to do with restaurant leases. It is just a useful reminder that in this town, the businesses with real staying power tend to be the ones with an owner standing behind the counter, not a groundbreaking ceremony still years out.

What is worth catching before the season turns

If you live here, a few things on the calendar are worth building your next few weeks around, because most of them do not last much past the first cold snap.

• The free Sunday concert series at Commons Beach runs through September 6. That is this coming weekend. After that, it is gone until next June.
• The Thursday farmers market at Commons Beach continues through October 22, then moves indoors to Boatworks Mall for the Fall Harvest Market, trading produce stalls and open-air stages for a shorter, quieter version of itself through mid-December.
• Jake's on the Lake is currently planning to stay open through the end of October. Whether that is a pause or a period, nobody involved seems fully certain yet.

None of this is a countdown clock designed to manufacture urgency. It is just an honest accounting of what changes here every fall, made a little more pointed this year by the possibility that one of the town's oldest gathering places might not be back next summer.

The bigger picture

Tahoe City's restaurant scene spent years being described, not always kindly, as a town waiting for something to happen. The Lodge sat empty. Safeway operated out of an aging building before its new location on West River Road finally opened last October. Storefronts turned over or sat dark. What is different about this year is not that the waiting stopped. It is that while the town's biggest promised project is still pouring foundations, its independent operators quietly went ahead and did the work themselves, one historic building at a time.

That is worth knowing whether you are grabbing coffee at Minglewood before a hike, booking a table at Savoie for a friend visiting from out of town, or making sure you get to Jake's one more time this fall just in case. The town is changing. It is just changing through restoration rather than replacement, and that is a distinction that matters if you plan on sticking around to watch how it turns out.

If you are already living that story, whether you are weighing a move within Tahoe City or just keeping an eye on what a place like this is worth as the town evolves, High Mountain Homes is a good person to know. Let's Connect.