Bar Nouveau, St. Johns’ Best New Pop-Up, Is Opening As a Restaurant

Back in 2018, Portland Monthly named a Southeast Portland wine bar one of its best restaurants of the year. Oui, the sit-down complement to Southeast Wine Collective, was serving, in then–editor in chief Kelly Clarke’s words, “aggressively seasoned, wholly seasonal” dishes like “tarragon-wafting risotto so cheesy it qualifies as fondue” and “green garlicky confit and Beluga lentils.” The woman behind the dishes: Althea Grey Potter—a New England expat and then-under-the-radar Portland chef, alumna of places like Ned Ludd—who was, in the words of Clarke, “the ideological opposite of food minimalists who cling to the timeworn fashion rule of always taking one thing off before leaving the house.” 

Two years later, Oui had closed, and Grey Potter had planned to leave the restaurant scene for good. She had developed an excruciating case of carpal tunnel, and the burgeoning restaurant reckoning—she calls it “a moment of self-reflection” for the field—forced her to reconsider her relationship to her career. “It’s not like I didn’t know that there are parts of this industry that have been really toxic, really abusive; I’ve definitely had those experiences in my career,” she says. “So I had this moment where I went, ‘Why did I choose this career? That treats the people in it like shit?’” 

So, she left restaurants behind. She got surgery for her carpal tunnel. She walked to Cathedral Park every day. She started a chile crunch company. She started a catering company. Years passed. And, after a while, she found herself absentmindedly designing dishes in her spare time. Procrastinating meant sketching out pop-up menus, sending pictures of her imaginary dinners to friends. “Look at what I’m doing instead of working on either of my two jobs,” she’d text. Then, Craig Melillo, the owner of the dreamily low-key St. Johns pizzeria Gracie’s Apizza, posted on Instagram offering up his space to a Monday–Tuesday pop-up. Grey Potter called dibs, with a pile of menus in hand and a mental Rolodex of ideas for the coming months. She hosted her first Bar Nouveau pop-up at Gracie’s in March 2025, filling layers of flaky puff pastry with chicken liver mousse for a savory mille-feuille and whipping spring onions into a soubise for crispy-skinned duck confit. In a matter of weeks, she was selling out entire nights of reservations weeks in advance. 

This summer, after years of working in other people’s kitchens and a five-year hiatus from the industry, Grey Potter will return to the restaurant world with her own restaurant. Bar Nouveau (the pop-up) will close at the end of May, and she’ll spend the next few months moving into the former Paiku space, just across Lombard from Gracie’s. In August, she’ll open Bar Nouveau (the restaurant) as a bistro. There, she’ll make the psychedelic, hippie–meets–French pastoral cuisine that made her a chef to watch way back in 2018. 

Grey Potter grew up in Massachusetts, but not in the Kennedy cosplay of Cape Cod or straight-laced Cambridge—she lived in a crunchier pocket of the state, a counterculture childhood in the country where her parents grew their own produce. Her family spent a year in France when Althea was 8, a period she calls her “culinary awakening.” All of these influences flit about as Grey Potter cooks: At previous Bar Nouveau pop-ups, she chopped up candied hazelnuts, blue d’auvergne, and pickled rhubarb and shallot to layer over locally grown endive, finished with a pour of Massachusetts maple syrup her mom carried with her across the country. Grey Potter’s deviled eggs evoke the pickle-y flavors of sauce gribiche, and her Oregon albacore, lightly seared, comes with a flageolet bean and olive salad. “It feels like I get to cook food that is an extension of myself,” she says. “It’s like if Julia Child did acid and lived on a commune for a while. A technicolor awakening.”

As she has for most of her career, Grey Potter leans heavily on Portland-area farms. Oregon City’s ChamBurn Farm supplies the eggs, produce comes from places like Portland’s Side Yard Farm. Elizabeth Singer, Bar Nouveau’s collaborator, farmer, sommelier, and beekeeper, collects her own honey to drizzle over toast from Starter Bread, baked with flours grown a few hours south at Camas Country Mill. “For me, it really starts with produce, with vegetables and the farms here,” Grey Potter says. “It’s just endlessly inspiring to me, the things people grow.” Although the chef is fiercely protective of her menu’s seasonal malleability, a few dishes will remain from season to season, like deviled eggs and chicken liver mousse (“two of my favorite things to cook and eat,” she says). 

Singer, who worked for California’s esteemed Rustic Canyon restaurant group, will pick out a few bottles for the restaurant’s wine list, and the restaurant will have a handful of nonalcoholic and alcoholic cocktails as well, in line with how the pop-up operates. But when Bar Nouveau opens later this summer, it will divert from the pop-up when it comes to service model: As opposed to ordering at a counter, as diners do at Gracie’s, Bar Nouveau will be a table service restaurant. Anyone who knows Grey Potter will see this as no surprise—her passion for hospitality and effusive warmth as a host, carrying dishes to tables, has been as much a part of her reputation as her vivid culinary palette.