St. Johns is a kind of city-within-a-city for Portland proper, with its own rhythm and pace of life. There’s great food here—and bars—but with respect to Gracie’s Apizza, the taqueria in the back of Tienda Santa Cruz, Starter Bread, and perhaps a few others, the neighborhood trends toward a for-us, by-us mentality. St. Johns has yet to be confused for one of Portland’s great dining neighborhoods. 

Bar Nouveau might change that. Just off North Lombard, it’s housed inside a refurbished 1940s building called Leavitt Station, a setting that matches the restaurant’s avowedly midcentury sensibility. There are no Resys to reserve, no QR codes. You book by the increasingly retro medium of text message. Chef Althea Grey Potter cooks French food without Francophile reserve. Her plates arrive like something from Julia Child or Alice Waters, whose cookbooks adorn the entryway. A decadent bouffant of chicken liver mousse, heaped like ruffled cupcake frosting atop sablé cookies, is fit for an Eisenhower-era Gourmet cover. Fried olives present like a French Scotch egg, wrapped in pâté, stuffed with melty Cantal Jeune, and served over honey mustard.

The restaurant insists that cherry-picked bits of the past belong in the present, and it revels in the contradictions therein. It’s not a time machine but an ode to delicious kitsch with enough soul to be transportive if you let it. 

Originally from New England, Grey Potter has grown a following across the better part of the past decade. She worked alongside Jason French at Ned Ludd (RIP), a wood-fired restaurant once described as “a museum of farm-to-table clichés,” and later opened Oui! Wine Bar (a 2018 PoMo Best New Restaurant) on SE Division. At Oui!, and then at a series of pop-ups, she incubated and refined what’s become her vernacular cuisine at Bar Nouveau: inspired, maximalist efforts that teeter excitingly on the edge of gluttony, like that delightfully froufrou liver mousse, grandiose deviled eggs, and a roast chicken in the manner of La Cuisine. 

Recipe wallpaper and a Value Village painting of rabbits gladly munching an enormous lettuce leaf meet you at the front door, where a homey armoire functions as an altar—a shrine of blue pumpkins, persimmons, and fir fronds on a late-fall visit, with candles flickering against a pair of bronze peacocks. 

Cement floors and cinder-block walls break the fantasy a bit, as do tables of the industrial office building deli variety and the staff’s mismatched denim uniforms. The feeling is of a pop-up gone permanent. But that feeling is real. It happily calls to mind an earlier era of Portland dining. The restaurant adheres to a gospel cobbled from faraway ideas and built largely out of thrift shop finds, gumption, and deft execution. The aesthetic of “this is what we have, this is who we are” lands almost contrarian against today’s backdrop of dining concept 2.0s and suburban outposts. 

If you’re drinking, a gratis thimble-cocktail arrives as a welcome nip; recently, a dainty boulevardier was fit for the Madonna Inn (or The Royal Tenenbaums) and drank beautifully among the doilies and vintage cutlery and pastel-pink napkins. The dining room is loud, but it’s a happy buzz. You’ll want to follow up with the bar’s substantially zhuzhed old-fashioned, made with good Bruichladdich scotch whisky, Caribbean rum, banana, lime, and clove bitters. Past that are a dozen or so well-chosen wines by the glass—a sparkling French white by Patrice Collin, a quirky Italian red by Francesco Brigatti.

The liver mousse and fried olives are listed as “snacks,” as are the cloverleaf rolls (Parker House style). You’ll want those to mop up the honey mustard beneath the olives. “Tots” are in fact one-inch cubes of pomme frites—crisp outsides, creamy innards—topped with onion and cornichon relish and a warm raclette fondue. Think Animal Style Fries, Julia’s Version. 

Many of the vegetables on Bar Nouveau’s menu hail from Sauvie Island—its tip is just three miles away as the crow flies. Because the island itself is not zoned for permanent kitchens, this is the closest we’ll get to a Sauvie Island sit-down restaurant. Still, it’s no church of vegetables. Grey Potter is a proud farm nerd, but she’s not the type of chef to let vegetables steal the light. The most interesting thing about her dishes is what she’s done to them. Depending on the night, beets from down the road might come dosed with pistachio butter over a bed of amaranth and sprinkled with buckwheat breadcrumbs or perhaps tossed alongside wedges of fennel dressed in pickling vinegar, plated around a dollop of fresh sheep’s cheese. 

Across multiple visits I tried four entrées, two outstanding, two just all right. Intricately constructed dishes are a staple of the French American school Grey Potter draws on, and they involve a certain risk/reward. A vol-au-vent with mushrooms and gloopy sauce missed on pastry texture and didn’t quite pull off the elegant over-the-topness found elsewhere in the outstanding delicata squash farci. Halved, it’s stuffed with a mixture of Merguez lamb sausage and farro, served over green lentils stewed with more lamb (this time smoked and braised), and garnished with crunchy greens. However complex the preparation, it’s the warm Mediterranean spice that stuck with me—never spicy, per se, but redolent of the south of France, picking up North African flavors from across the sea. It’s a balance of skill and flavor, a theatrical dish capable of creating an emotional impact on the diner—at least it did for me. Not every chef can do this.  

Then the dressed birds. A roast chicken with olives and confit garlic was well executed, though it left me thinking about better Frenchy roast chickens in town (at Coquine and so on). Roast duck, however, had the full range of Grey Potter’s cooking on display: crisp skin and a savory, tender chew beneath. With duck fat–roasted root vegetables and chewy spaetzle, the whole thing somehow approximated a cassoulet, its crispy tip of duck leg as a closing crunch. Bitter radicchio and the earthy-sweet acidity of a Sun Gold apple butter steered it away from the opulent gluttony that can be the unforgivable sin of this sort of dish. I’ve had more local duck in Oregon (this was the odd ingredient on the menu to be flown across the country), but none better. 

Desserts remain a work in progress. Though it makes a commanding entrance, the Sauvie Island squash parfait lacked the finesse and steady hand of the savory dishes. Similarly clumsy was a stodgy, texturally discordant pot de crème, served with two enormous cat’s tongue cookies poking out of a teacup. 

An ice-cold shaken Braulio amaro is just right after food like this, anyhow, served simply in cut crystal with an orange peel. More often than not, tiny details like this fall into place one after the next here; the bathroom comes with its own soundtrack (Patsy Cline’s “Why Can’t He Be You,” for example), and your napkin will be carefully folded upon your return. 

Which is why I don’t care that the dining room is a little scrappy or shabby. Or that the food isn’t really French. It’s midcentury American French cookbook food, which is its own whole thing, and it arrives in this impassioned, ad hoc show utterly differentiated from the myriad other “Portland French” dining rooms that have reigned over the city for the past decade. The spirit and the over-the-topness wins out over the cracks in the facade. The food at Bar Nouveau can be stirringly good, and there’s an overstuffed recipe drawer’s worth of ideas on the menu. It reminds me of what it was like to go out to eat in Portland a decade ago, and I mean that as a compliment.