Local Guide to Things to Do in Coeur d'Alene This August

If you walked past 424 E. Sherman Ave this spring, you'd have seen something odd for a restaurant celebrating a 40-year run: construction crews cutting a second entrance into the side of the building. Not a renovation. Not a remodel. A split.

Cricket's Restaurant & Oyster Bar has anchored downtown Coeur d'Alene with oysters and cocktails since 1985, and generations of regulars have walked in through the same door off Fifth Street the entire time. This year, the owners cut their own building in half. Cricket's kept its Fifth Street entrance and its regulars. The Sherman-facing half became something new: River & Rye, an upscale concept built around Spanish, French and Italian flavors with a Pacific Northwest lean, plus a craft cocktail program, sharing a roof with the restaurant that raised it.

For downtown, the split is one example of adding restaurant capacity without adding another address.

The same math shows up differently

A few minutes' drive from Sherman, at 4025 N. Government Way, Trevor Treller runs Terroir Fine Wines & Club out of a modest retail suite. Treller has spent 29 years in hospitality, from fine dining to private wine tours to high-end retail bottle operations, and he's one of the few credentialed sommeliers working in Idaho. The shop offers weekly classes, a monthly wine club, and an on-premise wine license in a space that's still, by most accounts, modest in square footage.

Local coverage has framed Treller's shop as a signal of something bigger: Kootenai County's food and drink identity is getting more ambitious, and locals increasingly want education, not just a bottle off a shelf. The Cricket's split and Treller's classes and wine club are examples of businesses adding offerings within their existing Coeur d'Alene locations.

Where the newest storefront actually landed

According to a Hagadone News Network report, People's Waffle opened May 22 at 400 N. Fourth St., a block off Sherman rather than on it. Co-owners Jacy Janson and Alyssa Agee built the concept from a food truck Agee ran in Spokane in 2020, using a recipe from her grandmother Gigi. It grew into a Spokane restaurant, Janson joined ownership in 2024, and this year the pair opened a second location just across the state line. The menu runs six sweet waffles, six savory waffles, and four waffle sandwiches, all gluten-free, with the Sweet Flight and a Benedict-style savory Benny as the early favorites.

Janson has said the Coeur d'Alene location made sense because so many of the Spokane restaurant's regulars were already Idaho residents making the drive over. It's a small detail, but it matters: the business picked a spot within walking distance of the same downtown core where Cricket's split itself, while Treller's shop is a few minutes' drive away.

The Hagadone News Network reported: "But right now, we're really excited about being a part of the community in Coeur d'Alene."

National chains have also opened or planned locations in the area this year. Raising Cane's opened its first North Idaho location on Neider Avenue in March. The Habit Burger Grill has been moving into a former Pizza Hut on Appleway ahead of a planned summer opening. An AutoZone is under construction at U.S. 95 and Dakota Avenue in Hayden, next to Dirty Birdy Car Wash. These highway-corridor locations contrast with the downtown storefronts and other local businesses described above, showing that the area has several kinds of commercial settings.

The calendar makes the same argument

That same compression showed up in how the town spent its August weekends. On Saturday, August 15, Ales for the Trail ran from 3 to 8 p.m. at Coeur d'Alene City Park, right on the lakefront. More than 25 breweries and cideries poured, live music came from JamShack and Jip Skippy & the Unprepared, and every ticket sold funded the North Idaho Centennial Trail Foundation, which maintains the 23-mile paved trail running from Higgins Point to the Idaho-Washington border.

The very next morning, Sunday, August 16, the Coeur d'Alene Antique & Classic Boat Festival set up along the docks and floating boardwalk of the Coeur d'Alene Resort, a five-minute walk from where the beer tents had stood the night before. It was free, ran 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and offered a stroll past gleaming wooden boats tied up along the water.

Here's the same August, laid out plainly:

Two of those four rows sit within a few blocks of the lake. The other two don't, and that's the useful part. Cars & Coffee, held in the parking lot of Coeur d'Alene Church of the Nazarene on August 22, was a free, no-registration meetup for car and truck enthusiasts, and it was genuinely worth the short drive. But it was a drive. So was the North Idaho State Fair, which ran its ten-day stretch at the Kootenai County Fairgrounds with a demolition derby on August 23 and concerts from Lee Brice and Walker Hayes closing out the fair's run. Big-footprint entertainment, the kind that needs acreage for grandstands and grass lots for parking, ends up at the edge of town almost by necessity. It doesn't fit in six walkable blocks, so it doesn't try to.

What this actually tells a resident

None of this is really about restaurants or festivals on their own. It's about where Coeur d'Alene keeps choosing to concentrate itself even as the town keeps growing outward. The map gets bigger every year. Subdivisions keep pushing further into Hayden and Post Falls, and the highway corridors keep filling in with the AutoZones and Habit Burgers that any growing town attracts. But the things people actually build their routines around, a restaurant adding a new concept within its existing downtown building, a beer festival and a boat show landing back to back on the same stretch of shoreline, keep happening in the same compact patch near the water that's always carried the town's identity. A few minutes' drive away, a sommelier is turning retail space into a classroom.

For residents, the August lineup put downtown's compact cluster alongside events farther out: Cars & Coffee and the North Idaho State Fair. If you're watching this town from a distance and wondering what actually holds it together beyond the lake views, this is it. Not the acreage. The six blocks.

Team Rosen Real Estate has spent decades working these same blocks and the neighborhoods pushing out from them, and we're always glad to talk through what a given stretch of Coeur d'Alene actually offers versus what it looks like on a map. Let's Connect.