For nine years, if you wanted local honey, a stromboli from Incline Bak'd's neighbors, or a chat with the same vendors your neighbors also buy from, you drove to a parking lot behind the Incline Village Library. You parked next to people picking up court paperwork, because the library lot doubled as the lot for the Incline Village Crystal Bay Justice Court. That was the market's home at 845 Alder Avenue every Thursday afternoon, May through early September, for close to a decade.
This year it left. The Thursday market spent its 2026 season three miles up the hill in Diamond Peak Ski Resort's upper parking lot instead, a space that sits mostly empty on summer afternoons because nobody is skiing in July. The move wrapped up its first full season on September 3, and it is worth understanding not just as a change of address but as a small case study in how a town with almost no spare land actually grows. Incline Village didn't build a new lot for its market. It borrowed one that already existed for a different season.
Nine Years Sharing a Lot With Traffic Court
Steve and Jill Rozier run Lake Tahoe Markets, the family operation behind the Incline Village Farmers Market. They spent nine years at the library lot before deciding they had outgrown it, and the reasoning had less to do with foot traffic than with the physical limits of sharing pavement with two other institutions. Jill Rozier put it simply when the move was announced: she and Steve live in the basin, know the area, and wanted a setup that actually served the locals who kept showing up.
The constraint wasn't customer demand. It was square footage. A market that wants to add vendors, live music, or a food truck needs room those other tenants weren't using for anything, and a shared library and courthouse lot has a hard ceiling. Steve Rozier described the old site as limiting in exactly those terms: not enough space for the extra vendors, activities, music, and food they wanted to bring in.
The Ski Hill's Empty Summer Parking Lot Had Room to Spare
The fix came from the Incline Village General Improvement District, which owns and manages Diamond Peak. IVGID didn't just permit the move, it actively worked to keep the market in town once the Roziers went looking for a bigger lot. The upper parking lot at 1210 Ski Way, built for winter ski traffic that vanishes by June, turned out to be exactly the kind of underused summer asset a growing Thursday market needed.
| Incline Village Library lot (2017–2025) | Diamond Peak upper lot (2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 845 Alder Avenue | 1210 Ski Way |
| Shared with | Library patrons, Justice Court traffic | Ski resort's off-season lot, largely empty in summer |
| Hours | Thursdays, 3 to 6 p.m. | Thursdays, 3 to 6 p.m. |
| Season | May through early September | May 21 through September 3, 2026 |
| Added capacity | Limited by lot size | Room for more vendors, live music, food |
Same day of the week, same hours, same core purpose. What changed was the ceiling on how big Thursday could get. Whether that additional room translates into a permanent second-life for the market at Diamond Peak in future seasons, or whether it becomes the new baseline location going forward, is the kind of detail residents will find out next spring when the 2027 season is announced.
Same Problem, Different Fix: Austin's Becomes Paxton's
A few miles away, another long-running Incline Village institution hit a version of the same wall this year, and solved it in the opposite direction. Austin's, the restaurant across from the Hyatt Regency on Country Club Drive, had been part of the town's dining rotation for years before its space changed hands. Rather than relocate, the new owners tore the concept down and rebuilt from nothing in the same footprint.
Cole Dunbar and Jordan Armstrong took over the space and opened Paxton's Settlement, named for Dunbar's son. The word Paxton, Dunbar has said, translates to something like peaceful village, which is the tone they were aiming for. Armstrong isn't new to the community. He has called Incline Village home since 1994 and spent three decades behind the bar and on the slopes before this project, which matters for a restaurant trying to build trust with the same locals who remembered what used to be in that room.
What changed under the new ownership:
- A full reset rather than a renovation: new staff, a new name, a menu built from scratch instead of carried over from Austin's
- A kitchen under Chef Dunbar built around Northern California forest traditions: smoking, foraging, and curing, reimagined with what he calls modern simplicity
- A bar program that dropped pre-made mixes for fresh juices and house-made syrups
- A menu that changes on its own schedule, sometimes more than once a week, depending on what's available rather than what's printed
Dunbar has described the choice bluntly: they didn't want to carry over anything from before, because this was meant to be a completely new restaurant with its own identity, not a facelift on an old one.
That is the inverse of what happened at the farmers market. The Roziers needed more physical space than their old lot had, so they moved to a bigger one. Dunbar and Armstrong didn't need more square footage on Country Club Drive. They needed a different identity in the same four walls, so they gutted what was there and started over.
What This Says About a Very Small Town
Two unrelated businesses, one public and one private, ran into the same underlying condition this year: Incline Village doesn't have much slack space, and if something has outgrown its current form, there are really only two moves available. Find an underused parcel that already exists for another purpose, the way the market found a ski hill's empty summer lot. Or keep the address and change everything else, the way Paxton's kept Austin's old room and replaced every other part of the concept.
Neither path required new construction, new parking variances, or a fight over undeveloped land, because there mostly isn't any left to fight over. That's worth knowing if you live here and have wondered why change in Incline Village tends to look like this: a market moving to borrowed ground, a restaurant rebuilding inside its own walls, rather than new buildings appearing where none stood before.
If you've been circling the old library lot on Thursday afternoons wondering where everyone went, mark Diamond Peak's upper lot for next May. And if you drive past Country Club Drive and notice the sign has changed, know that the kitchen behind it changed just as completely.
Lexi Cerretti and the team at Tahoe Icon live and work in this same small footprint, which is part of why we pay attention to how the town solves its space problems, one lot and one lease at a time. If you're curious about what else is shifting in the neighborhood this year, schedule a private consultation and we'll walk you through it over coffee.
