Is Fancy Baby Portland’s Next Great Wine Bar?

For too many reasons to count, restaurant and bar openings have been slim in Portland this year. But last Friday night I found myself at a party announcing a rather grand one.

Fancy Baby, a wine bar with an unabashed focus on champagne, is set to open to the public in early November. At the friends and family event, a well-dressed-for-Portland group mingled around a built-in ice trough, cueing for splashes of Guy Mea Champagne and Jura Gamay. Matching the choice bottles, wine VIPs peppered the crowd: Le Pigeon and Canard sommelier Andy Fortgang, wine educator and Arden owner Kelsey Glasser. A DJ working along the bar’s back wall turned out to be Rajat Parr, the James Beard Award–winning author, sommelier, and winemaker (he flew in from California for the opening).

The bar has completely transformed what used to be Cult, the shuttered adult toy shop (the KAWS doll type, not the vibrator type) at the corner of 12th and Glisan, in the heart of the Pearl District. The branding and design studio Each Other, who have also designed dining rooms for Yaowarat and Gabbiano’s, curated a vision of a dreamy European bar: swooping bartop, generous banquettes, British racing green on the walls, and cozy two-tops painted with light pouring through enormous fishbowl windows.

And the overseas vibes are no accident. “It was my dream to open the kind of place I like to go to when I’m in Europe,” the bar’s owner, William Oben, tells me. Oben, who also owns the Northwest Portland wine shop Cru & Domaine and an importing outfit called OWC, says his friends call him Billy, but “fancy baby” comes from a nickname given to him by his sister-in-law.

The bar will serve around 10 wines by the glass, with options starting in the $14–16 range, and primarily focus OWC’s import portfolio. These sit alongside fine and rare wines that run $20–50 per ounce (a standard glass of wine is about five ounces), offered using an open bottle preservation system called the Coravin. There’s also plenty of flexing to be done on the bottle list, which will feature between 400 and 600 bottles to start, per Oben—on that first night a smaller version of the final list featured heavy hitters from the likes of Krug, Eric Rodez, and Montevertine.

Katie Sombat, a certified sommelier and well-respected name in the Portland hospitality industry—most recently of Nostrana, and before that Tusk, Beast, and Buona Notte—is heading up the bar as GM. Alex Fogal, a chef at Langbaan, is behind the brief menu of wine-friendly snacks: think fried chicken with a caviar supplement, chips, small bites, and no burger. “Everyone in Portland does a burger!” says Oben. “So we are definitely not going to do it.”

While some new projects feel militantly fleshed out at this stage, Fancy Baby feels more like a living thing, still gestating and finding itself. It’s becoming cliché to offer the compliment that a place “doesn’t feel like it’s in Portland.” But behind the bar I look a little closer, past the open magnum of Marie Courtin Efflorescence, and spot a bottle of 2004 Thierry Allemand Cornas softly looming. Allemand’s Northern Rhône Syrahs are highly sought after, and with 20 years of age, even being in the same room as a bottle like this is something wine nerds like me go dotty over.

The result is a sort of optical illusion: There is one image of this place, fun and accessible with $14 glass pours and low-key drinking snacks, and there is another image of this place, where serious wine drinkers are fully and completely running the show, leveraging Oben’s connections and collection to offer a wine bar experience primed to compete for the city’s best.

The fancy babies themselves aren’t totally sure where it’s all headed yet, but early returns feel undeniably charming—and potentially thrilling. Oben says they may take reservations for the booths, but maybe not. They may or may not expand the food program in the months to come. We’ll see. For now the bar will be open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 4pm till 11 or midnight, doing whatever it decides to do. Whichever direction it takes, Fancy Baby is shaping up to be the sort of bar where you might see someone famous hanging out—perhaps behind the DJ decks—on a night in Portland coming soon.