Trelio turns 20 as founder steps back from Clovis restaurant. Why it’s a favorite
There’s a dish on Trelio Food & Wine’s menu that epitomizes what the Old Town Clovis restaurant is all about.
The mosaic salmon features pieces of fish arranged like a piece of stained glass on a bed of succotash made with Fresno State corn and dill yogurt.
It’s creative. Local.
As the restaurant celebrates turning 20 years old, creativity and commitment to buying local are two things that have stayed the same over the years.
The creativity shows up on the menu and in the restaurant’s willingness to reinvent itself. The local aspect is the way the restaurant buys its vegetables from farmers markets, even its rabbits or lambs from local sellers.
New owners
Trelio’s reputation has remained steady over the years. It ranked as the No. 2 high-end restaurant in town in a recent poll of Fresno Bee readers, just barely edged out by Tabachines Cocina.
Today, Trelio offers a prix fix (fixed price) five-course menu for $85, a style similar to The Elderberry House in Oakhurst.
But a lot has changed over the years.
One of the biggest changes is that founder Chris Shackelford is no longer running the day-to-day business of the restaurant.
He’s still 51% owner of Trelio.
But most of his days are spent as the executive chef of the Dolphin Bay Resort and Spa in Pismo Beach.
He turned over managing the ins and outs of Trelio to four of its core staff members in 2024. They own a 49% stake in the business and get 50% of the profits.
The decision to make the change came from a combination of post-COVID exhaustion and the realization that he had a capable staff who had been there for years.
“When you work in a restaurant from when you’re 14 until you’re 50, and ... you’re working 10-, 12-, 14-hour shifts,” he said. “I was tired of being everywhere all the time.”
So now the ownership includes the chef who created that mosaic salmon dish, Ross Verzosa, sommelier Trevor Crough, bookkeeper Kirsty Wimbish, and Kelsey Miller, who is a hospitality guru who zeroes in on details as tiny as how she holds her hand when she places a dish in front of a diner.
Restaurants and financial challenges
Trelio has never been Shackelford’s sole job. He sells wine and does business consulting work, which pays more than running a small restaurant.
“Actually, I don’t even know if I personally have made money off this business,” he said of the restaurant. “Most of the time, it’s always been consulting money that I’ve made.”
It’s not unusual for owners of small restaurants to not take a salary when times are tough.
Restaurants face an avalanche of challenges lately, including customers pulling back on spending due to inflation, rising rents, power bills and a California minimum wage of $16.90 an hour.
“It’s definitely not a business that should have survived,” he said of Trelio.
In fact, he always thought he would run it for two or three years and sell it. But luck was in his favor.
“Every time I feel the stress of, ‘Oh, is this going to be the year that we have to close it?’ Something weird happens, and everything’s fine and gets fixed,” he said. “It’s almost like there’s a fairy godmother out there.”
Where did the name Trelio come from?
The little restaurant at 438 Clovis Ave. with the plant-filled breezeway has been around with a Shackelford at the helm since 2006.
But technically, longer than that. Starting in the late 1980s, there was a restaurant on the spot called Dine With Us. In 1997, the owners — Elio Lucas and Tres Pierson — changed its named to Trelio, combining their first two names, according to Bee archives.
Shackelford, fresh from Erna’s Elderberry House as its sommelier, his chef brother Michael, and their maintenance man/bookkeeper dad Jim opened the restaurant.
They always intended to change the name, maybe hold a contest to rename it. But they ran out of time before opening and ended up sticking with it.
That go-with-the-flow mentality has allowed it to survive the past two decades. And boy, has it changed over the years.
It started as a molecular gastronomy place (think truffle spheres filled with gold-flecked liquid and edible foams). Then it focused on comfort food in the form of exotic animals, such as kangaroo and antelope (the threatening phone calls got to be a bit much, Shackelford said).
It was a Spanish restaurant for a while, then French, Italian.
Michael Shackelford left after a while and now is raising a family and working as an executive chef for an organization near Boise.
The COVID-19 pandemic saw Trelio selling loads of fried chicken (often with Champagne) in to-go containers when people couldn’t dine inside.
“Oh yeah, I hated fried chicken after that,” Shackelford joked.
In 2023, the restaurant switched to the five-course meal. A recent menu offered a choice of entrees, including Wagyu steak, pork schnitzel and jerk tofu katsu.
Trelio has plenty of vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options, especially when given prior notice.
A wine pairing can be added to each course for $62 total.
Wine has always been a big part of the business with its wine club, wine dinners and tastings where customers can try 35 to 40 wines.
A few years ago, there were bottles of wine selling for $5,000 or $10,000 on Trelio’s wine list, said sommelier Crough. Today, things are much more moderated (there’s still a $1,000 bottle on the wine list), but you can always buy a $12 glass or a $40 bottle of wine at the restaurant, he said.
Throughout it all Trelio was steadily becoming part of the community, getting to know its customers.
With just four people working in the dining room, that’s easy to do, said Miller, the service director. Indeed, while talking with a Bee reporter, a customer called Miller on her cell phone.
“Wine club members, sometimes they’re just coming in to pick up their shipment of wine and they just sit at the bar because they want to chat with us,” she said.
What’s next for Trelio?
So far, turning the four employees part owners has had the intended effect.
“I have more responsibility,” said chef Verzosa. “I felt like I have more say. This is my baby now. I gotta take care of it.”
Trelio is a small place, with just 10 tables inside — though it does have tables in the breezeway, a bar and tables in its library dining room. The restaurant books up with reservations on weekends, but the owners say they’d like more people to discover it.
Crough said many times it’s labeled as a “best hidden spot,” or a place known by word of mouth.
“That word of mouth really only extended so much,” he said. “We want to share that with as many people as possible. We want this to be your birthday spot, your anniversary spot. We want this to be your first prix fixe destination.”
This story was originally published June 19, 2026 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Trelio turns 20 as founder steps back from Clovis restaurant. Why it’s a favorite."
