Welcome to our Red Hut Café Website. We’re Dick and Nancy Gardner, your hosts at Lake Tahoe’s Red Hut Cafes – A Lake Tahoe Tradition since 1959.
The first Red Hut Waffle Shop opened in 1959. Originally known as the Old Donut Shop at Stateline, it was moved down to an open area 2 miles west to its current location.
The owners, Mac and Lorraine and their family ran the operation. Mac was chief cook and bottle washer. You could always recognize Mac. He was the one cooking your omelet. And yes, with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
The Red Hut’s seating capacity and configuration are exactly the same today as it was in 1959. Back then, the place was heated by a gas-cooking grill in the kitchen.
Some of those mornings were pretty cold. We would be dressed in our winter clothes having a cup of hot coffee and watching our breath in the air. The windows would steam up so that you couldn’t see the line of people waiting outside to be seated. Years later a freestanding electric heater was placed by the door to take off the winter chill.
In 1984, after being customers for twenty years, we purchased the business from Mac and Lorraine. Every effort was made to keep things as they were. Improvements were made, but only if the aesthetics were not changed. It was important to us to keep things just as they were.
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