When you walk into the new Crawdads on the Lake in Folsom, the first thing you notice are the expansive, sweeping views of the historic Rainbow Bridge, the bike trail below and Lake Natoma filled with dozens of colorful kayakers and paddle boarders. Your first thought is: “Why hasn’t this been done before?”

Opened in mid-June, new owner Trevor Shults took the leap and did it, converting the venerable but outdated Cliff House restaurant, with its small nautical windows and deck, and turning it into a modern, open concept. It now has a big, friendly bar that extends outdoors along with patio seating and wall-to-wall views of the surrounding scenery.

“Every weekend, there’s about four to six horses that come from Shadow Glen (stables) over there. They ride the trails. They come up here, they have lunch, and they go back. Very cool thing,” Shults says. 

Shults also owns Crawdads on the River, which he bought 13 years ago. He was already water-friendly, with boats pulling up to eat or have cocktails at the restaurant on the Sacramento  River. And he was familiar with the old Cliff House, having grown up in Sacramento and eating there with his parents.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime space. It’s a legacy project.” Trevor Shults, owner, Crawdads on the Lake

The opportunity to buy it came up more than a year ago, when his broker Tom Edler, CEO and president of Pacific Coast Advisors, told him it might be for sale. But did he really want to undertake the massive renovations, which included lifting beamed ceilings and reinforcing a cliff?

“All these cross beams had to be lifted,” Shults says, looking upward at the ceiling. “We had this space for the formal dining room, and it was all lower ceiling. We had 7-foot-tall ceilings, so we had to raise these beams up to 12 feet, and the beam in the back went up to 10-and-a-half.” They also added roll up garage doors that open to the outdoor patio.

Architect Melainie Lagrou of RMW Architecture & Interiors in Sacramento was the designer on the project and had worked with Shults before.

“The potential was just evident, promoting more connectivity to the river, making the space a little bit more relevant, a little bit brighter, more fun, really sectioning it off and allowing it to act as kind of a connection to the landscape that’s already there,” Lagrou says. “And then you bring in the fun vibe of Crawdads. Crawdads down on the river has such a wonderful atmosphere, and you bring that up here on the lake, and I think that’s really fueled the fire, just bringing in those elements.”

“We had to have full-on engineer drawings. We had to have soil sample engineers. We had to put in 19, 18-inch-circumference, 14-feet-deep footings into the side here,” Shults says as he looks over the patio railing. A soil engineer came out and directed placement of the footings until they hit solid soil, which was a combination of dirt and clay. The result is an expansive deck that stretches from one end of the restaurant to the other, where guests can sit outside and enjoy the view. 

When you walk into the bar, there’s a huge metal sculpture of Ali the Gator on the wall created by metal artist Dan Murphy. She’s the sister or girlfriend of Al Gator, who’s at Crawdads on the River. The sprawling bar, which has counters inside and outside, serves up such craft cocktails as a frozen Aperol spritz and Mardi Gras, a concoction of passion fruit, guava and three rums. Food options include ahi nachos, a bucket of crawdads with corn on the cob and andouille sausage, jambalaya and gumbo, along with the popular Buffalo wings, steak sandwiches and burgers, and vegetarian options such as cauliflower tacos and Thai kale salad. 

Lagrou talked about how they came up with the design concept for Crawdads. “We want it to be beautiful, but we want it to operate really well. We want it to be functional for the people who are coming to eat. We want it to be functional for the staff that is working there. So the first thing I look at is, how is the space going to be used? What are the resources? Where’s the kitchen? Where would be the opportunity spot for the bar? Where do we want the band?” she says. 

At a recent lunch hour, happy guests stop and thank Shults for creating this gathering spot.

“We were working on it for, I don’t know, probably a year and a half before it truly came to fruition,” he says. “We spent a lot of time coming in and out of here. I wasn’t completely sold, just because I didn’t know what I could do with the space. You know, it was old. It needed a lot of work. It was a lot of square footage. I knew I needed to do this, and I didn’t know how I was going to accomplish it.” 

Currently, there’s live music on weekend afternoons and nighttime concerts every other weekend. The free Folsom city shuttle carries visitors from the restaurant to spots around Old Folsom for pickup. Future plans include utilizing part of the patio for Lakeside Cafe, a breakfast and lunch spot, and expanding the kitchen.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime space,” Shults says. “It’s a legacy project.”

Crawdads on the Lake, 9900 Greenback Lane, Folsom.

–

Subscribe to the Comstock’s newsletter today.