Harbor House Bistro & Beach Goods

This is an unusual situation. This restaurant is the food and park store concession, so the operator cannot legally advertise (otherwise it might appear that the State of Nevada is somehow endorsing this business).
The nearest town to this location is Incline Village, Nevada; The Harbor House (Sand Harbor) is about 5 – 6 miles south of Incline Village on highway 28. (I’m not sure why Unilocal is calling this «Washoe, NV».)
The «restaurant» has, in the past, served a light breakfast, a casual lunch (everything from burgers and fries to smoked salmon salad), and a more formal dinner (including real silverware and wait service). In addition — which is a little weird — they operate a store that sells beach basics like sunscreen, ice cream, and beach balls.
Anyway, here’s the story on the restaurant portion as I know it:
We discovered this restaurant by accident in August of 2007. We were «camping» nearby on our small sailboat, when the weather became too nasty to cook on the boat. We noticed that there was some sort of restaurant in the Nevada State Park at Sand Harbor, so we decided to try it for dinner. It was amazing.
We had fantastic food, large portions, and one of the most incredible views on the planet; the outside dining deck overlooks one of the beautiful bays at Sand Harbor (Lake Tahoe’s east shore in Nevada). The menu was reasonably comprehensive and included a number of different salads and about a dozen entrees. The service was very, very good; the owner checked on us and told us quite a bit about how he was operating the restaurant and some details about some of the food we had eaten. The total for two — including salads, entrees, dessert and coffee — was $ 71.79 including tax and tip. We were so thrilled with this place that we decided to make it part of our annual summer vacation.
*** 2^nd Visit, SUMMER 2008 ***
In August of 2008, we again anchored our little sailboat in Sand Harbor, but this time we planned on dinner at The Harbor House. Unfortunately, the place had changed a little; the food was still very, very good, but the menu was much smaller. Now the menu was truly «bistro-​like».
The employees told us that there just wasn’t much demand for dinner. I strongly suspect that this is because the owner isn’t allowed to advertise, and the beach crowd that uses the park leaves in the late afternoon, so there aren’t really any customers on site during typical dinner hours. We weren’t very hungry, so we only had a couple of wonderful salads, desserts and coffee for $ 47.12 (incl. tax and tip). Sadly, we were the ONLY customers in the restaurant (on the deck) when we had dinner around 6:30 or so. I think that a couple of other customers wandered in as we were leaving, but it was clear that they hadn’t planned on eating here.
*** 3^rd Visit, SUMMER 2009 ***
Now it looks like the dinner menu has essentially disappeared. They seemed to be open until about 8pm or so, but there was no one there eating dinner.
I think that most of the lunch crowd was eating burgers and fries, so customers probably miss the really good stuff here.
The lunches look good, and they still have a couple of daily specials, so it would be possible to have «dinner» here, but I don’t think it would be a fine dining experience. The employees were still pleasant, the view remains magnificent, and the food looks good. (We didn’t eat there this summer.) They also appeared to have a nice selection of wines.
There weren’t hours posted on the door but one of the employees told us that they open at 8am. (They do serve a few breakfast specials, too.)
Note that the annual summer Shakespeare Festival is held each July and August at Sand Harbor, and this is immediately adjacent to The Harbor House. The food served at the Festival is VERY expensive ($ 12 for ONE cup of coffee and ONE small dessert, for example), so why don’t you give the Harbor House a try for a casual, but good, meal before enjoying a play?