RESTAURANT NEWS | PORTLAND
Aalto Lounge Reopens in Portland With Filipino Bar Food and Cocktails
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By MEI CHEN | 2:01 p.m. PT, June 1, 2026
Photos by Sofie Murray
AUTHOR BIO: Mei Chen has worked for nearly a dozen start-ups in as many years, taking her to several West Coast cities. While she’s sure her current day job is permanent, she also has her eye on Carmel.
Aalto Lounge has reopened on Belmont with new owners, a new menu, and a reason to think about the longtime Portland bar as more than a place for one more drink.
Bartender Olivia Ennis Hilton and chef Meesh Fennimore, the couple behind the Nomida pop-up, reopened Aalto on May 29 after taking over from previous owners Kate and Alex Wood. The bar has been a Portland fixture for more than two decades, known for its mid-century look, DJ nights, patio, and low-lit Belmont familiarity.
The new version keeps the bones of Aalto but gives the food and cocktail program a more defined point of view. Fennimore’s menu pulls from Filipino, Japanese, and Hawaiian cooking, the same mix that shaped Nomida. The lineup includes bistek frites, an adobo chicken melt, mapo tofu Frito pie, sinigang-seasoned shrimp chips, and rockfish ceviche with shrimp chips.
The cocktail list from Ennis Hilton works in the same register, with a pandan Old Fashioned, calamansi margarita, brown-butter Milo Manhattan, black sesame mai tai, and white Negroni. It’s not a hard turn away from what Aalto was. It’s more like someone finally decided the food should be as considered as the drinking.
The bar also has a refreshed look, including a red-tiled bar and work from local queer artists. That detail matters here because this isn’t just a reopening with a new menu and some fresh paint. Ennis Hilton and Fennimore are making Aalto into a queer-owned bar with serious food, serious cocktails, and enough of the old Aalto left intact that regulars won’t feel like someone erased the place while they were gone. For Portland, that feels like the right kind of comeback: not a reset, exactly, but proof that an old address can still have a new argument to make.
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