You may know the West Shore’s Tahoe House Bakery & Gourmet for its apple strudel or sando-and-salad combos, but it wasn’t always a buttoned-up breakfast and lunch joint. Like a lot of Tahoe, it’s gone through some changes over the years.
“We founded it as a restaurant with dinner and a bar,” original owner and chef Peter Vogt said. “We got a seasonal liquor license, so for three months in spring the restaurant would have to stop serving alcohol. It was horrendous to survive that time. We would get phone calls with people asking, ‘Do you have liquor?’ We’d say ‘no’ and they wouldn’t come in.”
The dining room was located where the store and bakery sales counter currently are, and the bar comprised today’s seating area and a now-closed section behind the wine rack.
“It was an old, long, wooden-top bar,” said Barbara Vogt Melrose, Peter’s eldest daughter, who, along with her sister Caroline Vogt Lee, returned to Tahoe in the mid-’90s to run the restaurant. “The owners before us had a Western theme, so there was still a metal wagon wheel set into the wall.”
Barbara remembers the “horrible” ’70s-style black, brown, and orange shag carpet; the cozy couches and the wood-burning stove; how the space was dimly lit and always had a fire going in the fireplace.
The drinks were stiff and the food fare was Swiss-themed. Vogt himself grew up in Switzerland before moving to Georgia in 1966 as a young man to work at the legendary Atlanta Cabana, owned at the time by Doris Day and frequented by A-listers from throughout the South.
“In those days, there were no culinary schools in the U.S., so if you wanted good food, you brought in Europeans,” Vogt said. “The owner was Swiss, and he ‘imported’ us.”
However, the humid southern climate and flat landscape weren’t a good fit for Vogt. His boss didn’t want to let him go, but he had a friend in Tahoe who needed help for the winter season. Vogt jumped at the opportunity.
“I got in my ’64 Rambler and drove out West,” he said. “Gas was 23 cents a gallon.”
In 1967, Vogt became the chef of the Swiss Lakewood Lodge in Homewood and met Helen Ganz, a Swiss-born waitress who also cleaned rooms. The two fell in love and were married the following year. After a stint working in the Bay Area, the couple returned to Tahoe (always part of their plan), now with two young girls in tow, and in 1977 started the Tahoe House.
“The first 15 years were not good,” Vogt recalled. “It was tough. [The restaurant] was an overnight success that only took 30 years.”
In the beginning it was the nighttime crowd that kept them afloat.
“We were fortunate that the locals took to us right away,” Vogt said. “There were a bunch of local people at that time. We still had three lumber yards in Tahoe City, and the owners were regulars. We called them ‘the lumber barons.’ They would hang out after work and drink and play dice.”
Helen greeted everyone at the door and oversaw the dining room while Peter helmed the kitchen. They opened at 5 p.m. every day and often stayed open late.
“We had a big crowd from Alpine Meadows, too,” Peter continued. “Nick Badami, the owner, and Werner Schuster, the VP, were regulars. A lot of the ski patrol guys would come in, along with the ski instructors and other employees. A lot of them lived on the West Shore, where it was less expensive, and they would stop by on their way home and hang out. It was fun.”
One of those people coming from Alpine Meadows was Jamie Curtis, a Tahoe City local throughout the ’70s and early ’80s who worked nine years at River Ranch in varying capacities. The era of the early days of the Tahoe House is fond to her: “It was a different time,” she noted. “The tenor was different. Tahoe was still rustic. Our managers and owners were just chill, everything was loose. Everybody knew everybody, and there was a spirit in the air. There was something special about that time; a lot of us can’t put our finger on it, but we felt it.”
In a time before the internet and pocket computers, it was human-to-human interactions at watering holes like the Tahoe House that kept the community connected.
“When the Alpine avalanche hit, the power was out,” Vogt Melrose reminisced, referring to the 1982 avalanche that left seven dead. “No one had any idea what was going on. Word of what happened spread by people coming in to the bar.”
In the early days of the Tahoe House it seemed like just about everyone came into the bar — even the local Catholic priest.
“His name was Father Mulligan, and he drank Jack Daniels,” said Peter. “I used to tease him. I used to tell him, ‘What are you doing hanging out in a Protestant bar?’”
Peter spoke on about other sepia-toned happenings during the first few years of his restaurant.
“I remember once between Christmas and New Years we were without power for four days. The locals had no place to go and a lot of people didn’t even have heat. We were one of the only places with a generator, so it got crazy busy.”
While the storm brought in customers, it also prevented any deliveries from arriving. “We only had one thing on the menu because we ran out of food. I made a Swiss dish, like a stew or a Stroganov, and that was it.”
The bar and the dining room lived on, welcoming guests and creating memories even as the business model began to change. Peter saw an open niche in Tahoe and began making fresh baked breads. In 1994 the restaurant opened its first retail bakery and soon after began staying open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. When the customers finally left, the night-shift bakers would come into work, and delivery trucks were often loaded up with fresh-baked goods at 5 a.m.
“We got to the point where we were so busy, something had to go,” Vogt Melrose said. “It was just too much for a mom-and-pop business … we were struggling to keep our heads above water.”
When the foothill city of Roseville underwent significant urban renewal late in the last century, liquor licenses there were hard to come by. The Tahoe House received numerous offers to buy theirs and realized they could fund a remodel with the proceeds to focus on its daytime business.
And so, after all the years and drinks and stories, it was that seasonal liquor license (since upgraded to year-round) procured by Peter that funded the next generation of Tahoe House. The bar was officially ripped out in April of 2001, allowing it to become the brightly lit, aromatic, photos-of-the-alps-on-the-wall hub it is today.
But back to that seminal event in Tahoe/Truckee history — the ’82 avalanche at Alpine Meadows.
When its lone survivor, Anna Conrad, became North America’s first live-rescue Avalanche victim by a canine (she was buried for 117 hours and 20 minutes; the dog, Bridgette, having been trained by a group called Wilderness Finders founded in 1975 for such a purpose), Peter got an idea.
“I talked to some of the guys at the ski patrol,” he said. “I said, ‘You need to get some avalanche dogs trained [at Alpine].’ I offered to help because I grew up training German shepherds in Switzerland. I had a background and I helped them get started, went out there and helped them train.”
In doing so, Peter helped establish the first-ever avalanche dogs in the Lake Tahoe area. It was in his blood. “My dad was with the Zurich police force for 39 years, and I grew up training dogs for the police force,” he said.
Peter’s childhood community on the outskirts of the city was so small that his father was its lone officer — “his dog was his partner,” Peter said — and Vogt’s home phone number was also the police line.
“Sometimes, when I was a teenager and [dad] and mom weren’t around I had to answer the phone and decide whether to call downtown or not,” he said.
A few years later, Peter would rely on those decision-making instincts to make it to North Tahoe in the first place.
It had already been a big early winter in the Sierra when Vogt took the southern route west from Georgia in ’67. His boss in Atlanta, who had visited Tahoe prior to the completion of I-80, told Peter, “When you get to Sacramento, take Highway 50.”
Vogt arrived in South Lake amid a big Sierra snowstorm.
“I drove up Emerald Bay,” he said. “And it was snowing like crazy. I had bald tires, no snow tires. I was like, ‘Oh my.’ I saw a sheriff’s car and pulled over to talk to him. I said, ‘Am I going the right way to Homewood?’”
“‘Oh yeah,’ he answered. ‘Another 10 miles or so, just keep on going.’”
Peter Vogt kept on going through that snowstorm, bald tires and all. Then the man just kept going, starting the dimly lit, hard alcohol-serving Tahoe House with his wife Helen. Forty-nine years later the shag carpet is gone and the place has evolved from bourbon to bread. But what they started is still here — and that says a lot.
