But the best part, and the highlight of my recent trip to Tahoe, is Sam Choy’s Ohana Diner.

The eponymous cafe from Sam Choy, a James Beard Award-winning chef and the self-proclaimed “godfather of poke,” greets visitors as they arrive at the alley and instantly transports them away from the north shore (of Tahoe) and to the North Shore (of Oahu.)

Food Network star and James Beard Award-winning chef Sam Choy, left; poke nachos, upper right, from Sam Choy’s Ohana Diner at Bowl Incline; signage at one of Sam Choy’s Seattle restaurants (lower right). (Andrew Pridgen/SFGATE & Getty)
Food Network star and James Beard Award-winning chef Sam Choy, left; poke nachos, upper right, from Sam Choy’s Ohana Diner at Bowl Incline; signage at one of Sam Choy’s Seattle restaurants (lower right). (Andrew Pridgen/SFGATE & Getty)

Bowling alleys and James Beard Awards may not sound like they go together, but for Choy, it was a natural fit — as well as a return to his earliest days as a restaurateur. “Bowling alleys is where I started,” Choy told SFGATE this week. “We first ran a restaurant at Kona Bowl. It’s still going. They’re still killing it.”

From Choy’s first bowling alley cafe, which opened in 1991, came notoriety on Hawaii’s Big Island. Since then, it’s been a three-decade ascent of a mini empire that now includes several restaurants in Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest, a series of cookbooks, regular appearances on the Food Network and featured spots at cooking events working alongside other big-name celebrity chefs.

Though Choy’s star has risen, his mission remains the same: to spread the gospel of his signature dish, poke.

How does he do it? He sticks to the simple formula that got him there: “It has to feel right,” he said. “Everyone knows deep down when something’s good — when it’s going to work and when it’s not. When to go ahead and when to not talk yourself into something.”  

‘Then I found the bowling alley’

Bowl Incline’s new owners, Steve and Tracy Tomkovicz, share that same ethos. The couple spent most of their career building and running a business called S&S Supplies and Solutions, a work safety equipment distributor headquartered in Fairfield.

In 2018, the Tomkoviczes took a buyout for the family business. Soon, they felt a gravitational pull to Incline Village from their home in Napa. “Like many people who’ve come here over the last few years, we just knew it was time for a change,” Steve told me between frames at Bowl Incline. “I think our intent was to live up here, ski, hike and just enjoy a little life. Then I found the bowling alley.” 

From the earliest days of negotiating the purchase of the property, the Tomkoviczes were told that bowling was bad business — or at least one they might regret. When the bowling alley hit the market in early 2021, many locals in the know assumed that such a coveted property, in the heart of the town’s commercial corridor, would be ripe for razing and redevelopment.

“I don’t think anyone thought they were going to see the bowling alley reopen,” Crystal Bay-based real estate agent Ann Nichols told SFGATE. “That many square feet — and you look at the other development going on around there. … On paper, it probably made the most sense to tear it down.”

The bowling alley is also less than a block from a new 40-unit condo project known as Nine 47 Tahoe. The 2-acre parcel on Tahoe and Southwood boulevards is slated for build out, with individual units expected to sell for between $2.5 million and $7 million.  

But relying on conventional wisdom isn’t how Steve Tomkovicz has ever thought about doing business. “We lead with the heart, we really do,” he said. “Look, I’ll be the first to admit I knew nothing about bowling. But look around you. We walked in here for the first time, and we knew — this was something the community needed. Maybe we needed it a little, too.”

Reimagining Bowl Incline as a foodie destination

As much of a risk-taker as he is, Choy admits he was one of the initial skeptics of Tomkovicz’s plan.

“I’ve known Steve for a while,” Choy said, referring to a friendship that started when the pair was working at a charity event together a decade ago. “When Steve called, of course I was going to come see it. It’s Steve and it is a bowling alley after all.”

Choy told Tomkovicz that before he committed, he needed to see the bowling alley for himself. “He gave me kind of like a weak, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea.’ So, I get on a plane, and I get there in the evening. And I take 10 steps in it and the stench and the stickiness of the floor … and the darkness. I make a U-turn,” Choy recalled.  

The famous chef’s knee-jerk assessment wasn’t hyperbole. Incline Bowl was on its last legs, and everyone in town knew it.  

The last time I’d set foot in the bowling alley was in the winter of 2019. I was greeted by a sign that read “Don’t care much how you do it in California,” with a Nevada state flag sticker on the bottom. Once inside, the stale-casino-carpet smell of secondhand smoke mixed with day-old spilled whiskey and bowling shoe spray was nearly overwhelming. With ceiling tiles yellowed or missing, asbestos in the walls and the lanes bowed or cracked, the bowling alley seemed to be hanging by the last and thinnest of its remaining threads.

As much as I love grim scenes scored by the sounds of pins ricocheting, it was heartbreaking to witness the decline of a place that, in its heyday, was a clean and well-lit hub for Incline’s first generation of families. Many were airline employees and could live anywhere, but chose to be in the mountains — the area’s original remote workers.

So, it wasn’t just a surprise to step into the shiny and bright 21st century upgrade — it felt close to miraculous.

“You know, in Tahoe we just don’t get nice things like this,” my bowling partner and friend Dan Sussman told me while we paced cautiously around the refurbished building. It was as if we’d somehow landed on the Yellow Brick Road.

Dan and his wife, Trish, had brought their two daughters up from South Lake Tahoe to check out Bowl Incline, which officially opened in June 2022. They weren’t disappointed. For those of us who were raised in the hour-past-last-call low light of the original, to arrive in a clean, sparkling-new place where we could bring our kids almost seemed like too much of a good thing.

‘It’s a risk’

Though won over by the time, energy and concern invested in the bowling alley, I confided in Tomkovicz that I couldn’t help but feel the tug of something that had come and gone.

He placed his hand reassuringly on my shoulder and laughed. “You may or may not be surprised, but I get that — a lot,” he said. “But look, this is a place that had to start over, it needed new life. We had to go from beneath the floors on up and we wanted to do it right. We know it could’ve been offices, it could’ve been condos — but is that what a town like Incline needs? Especially now? No.”

Choy agrees. “I’ve been a part of projects like this before, and it’s a risk — the biggest risk,” he said. “And it’s a challenge. You know, there are two things we’re up against: One, introducing some island cuisine that’s very unique, and getting labor to teach them how to do it. And two, doing it in a space that you’re transforming.”

Choy said the Tomkoviczes, who are “great people and partners and know how to do it right,” have given him the “trust and resources” to solve those problems.

“Incline reminds me of Hawaii 30 years ago when we’d have shoulder seasons,” he said. “Tourists come in summer and spring break, and all in between is really tough. In Tahoe, you’ve got winter guys [who] come out to ski, and all hell breaks loose in the summer. But to survive year-round, it’s [about] connections. It’s timing. It’s ups and downs.”  

I told Choy that my recent visit to Incline had featured a predictable shoulder season slump, especially on the food front. Many favorite eateries were rolling with stripped-down menus and bare bones staff, while others were closed on the weekdays as winter ground to a close.  

But when I arrived at the new Bowl Incline, the place was buzzing, including a line to the door at Sam Choy’s.

“I make sure we’re running a tight kitchen and we’re good with our suppliers,” Choy said. “My mission is to not have a fridge-to-fryer spot and to not have to 86 any items. It’s hard though, when the 80 is closed or there are delays. Somehow, we found a way though.”

‘Now you know the secret’

Menu highlights at Sam Choy’s include the poke nachos, which feature Choy’s shoyu poke, topped with lomi tomato and jalapeños, drizzled with a spicy house aioli, unagi sauce and garnished with cilantro over homemade oversized tortilla chips. The massive serving was enough for four famished adults and three children to split, with some left over for the family next to us to sample.

Head chef Gary Swenson recommended the spam musubi — an oversized roll with the preserved meat wrapped in furikake egg and hapa rice (a mixture of brown and white rice) blanketed in nori, drizzled with aioli and unagi sauce and garnished with diced green onion and sesame seeds. Swenson was right: It was the day’s biggest hit. One bite is all it took for the Sussmans to admit that they’d recently booked an impromptu family trip to Kauai to escape the snow doldrums.

For a moment, it felt like we were already there. 

Those dishes, plus orders of the truffle fries and wings — crunchy and caramelized glazed with a deep orange Sriracha sauce — left our group on the verge of bloat, not to mention parched. The Sussmans went for a round of drinks and returned with a couple of beers and the Bowl Incline specialty cocktail, the Point Up Baller, a rum-infused version of Disneyland’s Dole Whip.

By the end of our stay at the bowling alley, my group, full and buzzed and feeling cautiously optimistic, had decided that the Tomkovicz-Choy partnership could be a template to rejuvenate all of Tahoe, and that it only takes good food and good spaces to bring communities together.

When I shared this with Choy, he chuckled and told me he approved of that appraisal. “Now you know the secret, too,” he said.