A new restaurant in Austin will open by the end of the month to serve cuisine inspired by several cultures around the world.
The bohemian-style restaurant Potluc had a ribbon cutting on Oct. 9. at 6004 W. North Ave. Owned by chef Mary Proietti, Potluc will have its reservation-only soft opening by the end of this month and grand opening next month.
Proietti defines bohemian-style as something influenced by several different cultures.
“My food is not the same as anybody else’s, anywhere,” Proietti told Austin Weekly News. And the cuisine is accompanied by eclectic decorations and multi-cultural music. “It’s going to be a place of good energy and connection. …Everything is going to all meld together. I want people to come in and have this feeling, that joy and comfort and peace.”
Potluc’s menu includes food inspired by Africa, India, the Caribbean, Mediterranean and American South. There will also be regional Italian food in honor of Proietti’s late husband, who was from Rome, and her mother-in-law, who was from the northern Italian region of Lombardy.
For Potluc’s soft opening, Proietti is planning to cook Jamaican meat patties with tamarind sauce and plantain; grilled lamb sausage with harissa, Moroccan spice, preserved lemon and goat sauce; Moroccan chicken with coconut rice; and oxtail with African and Caribbean spices, butter beans, collard greens and polenta.
Proietti is also planning to serve red snapper escabeche — a Jamaican dish with sizzling red and green peppers, onions, garlic, oil and vinegar, poured over fish — and a plate of foie gras sausage, South Carolina red grits, a broken tomato sauce and purple yams.
One of the menu’s more expensive dishes will be Bistecca Fiorentina, or bone-in steak that originated in Tuscany. But there will also be less expensive options.
“Everybody’s favorite is my collard greens because they’re southern, they’re Indian, they have all these different spices in them, and they’re African,” Proietti said.
For many meals, customers will be encouraged to eat without cutlery.
“Dishes that are meant to be eaten with hands will be eaten with hands, and we will give you something to clean your hands. I want you to get into it and really feel the food,” Proietti said. “People need to start being more sensory and perceptive and not just use a fork.”
Much of Proietti’s culinary influence is from her upbringing. She describes her father as bohemian and her mother as more conservative, with an African and American Indian background. Her father, who was multiracial and had Indian heritage, took her to restaurants “that served only crazy animal things, like rhinoceros,” she said. And throughout her life, Proietti has surrounded herself with friends from different cultural backgrounds.
“My food is going to have a little bit of everybody in it,” she said.
Proietti plans to create seasonal menus and cook most of the dishes herself, with help from her sous chef. She is looking to hire more line cooks and servers before the soft opening.
Potluc is still waiting for its liquor license and plans to sell wine, beer and mixed drinks. The restaurant’s drink menu also includes a wide range of herbal teas from around the world, and Proietti plans to host high tea on Sunday afternoons.
After opening, Proietti plans to host cooking classes at Potluc.
“I think I can show people how to use spice, because a lot of people are afraid to [use] it,” she said. She plans to incorporate the health benefits of spices and teas into her cooking classes.
Potluc will be open Wednesday through Sunday. On Sundays, the restaurant will only serve a fixed-price meal, backed by praise music and inspired by Proietti’s mother.
“Her Sunday dinners are legendary, so I’ve been racking my brain trying to go through the ones that I especially love,” Proietti said. “Every dime we get from that will go to feed someone or help someone in the community.”
With Potluc, Proietti aims to create a multi-sensory experience that inspires customers after they depart from the restaurant.
“I hope when they leave, they feel something,” she said. “I want them to feel sourced. I want them to know that God is in this place. I want them to be moved spiritually, to get to know their neighbor, to be kind and generous and feed people — not only food, but food for their soul.”
Journey to Potluc
Born on the West Side, Proietti has envisioned opening a restaurant since she was a child.
After studying art and psychology in college, and working in the corporate sector for years, Proietti attended Kendall College in Chicago for culinary school. One of her instructors became a friend, and the pair opened fine dining restaurant Bel Sogno in Ravenswood in 1994. Two years later, Proietti started her high-end catering company, Feast Your Eyes.
“The feather in my cap is that I did all the events for Halle Berry when she won for ‘Monsters Ball,’” Proietti said. At the 2002 Academy Awards, Berry won Best Actress — the first African American woman to win the award. “She ate my food and took it all with her, everything that was left over.”
After Proietti’s husband died, she worked to turn their 200-year-old historic home in Galena into an Airbnb, where she served food in the dining room.
Around the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, Proietti’s cousin told her about then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Invest South/West initiative to reinvigorate neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago.
“He said, ‘They need a real fine dining restaurant, which you know how to do,’” Proietti said of what her cousin told her about Austin.
“There’s money in Oak Park, but there’s money in Austin too,” Proietti said, adding that she still wanted her menu to have more affordable options, too. “I didn’t want to open something and then price myself out of it. I want everyone to come and eat.”
Proietti’s cousin took her to visit 6004 W. North Ave., where Kohn’s clothing store used to be. Proietti said many people commented on the space’s transformation during the Oct. 9 ribbon cutting.
“They were like, ‘What? We would never think that this would happen because how are you going to put a restaurant in that little place?’ And I said, ‘There’s a lot of space in here,’” Proietti said. She added, “I wanted an intimate space.”
But it took much longer than expected to transform the old clothing store into a bohemian-style restaurant.
“The bank that I chose, Dogwood State Bank, I’m still fighting with them because they didn’t want me to open the restaurant,” Proietti said of the North Carolina-based institution. “They took all my money. They took everything out of all my accounts, and we’re still fighting with them now. I was called a n*****.”
Building out Potluc was supposed to take about eight months, but the contractor who was working on it took closer to 20 months. Proietti said she tried working with the Dogwood State Bank to fire him and hire another, but they wouldn’t let her.
“They took every penny I had saved for my equipment,” Proietti said. In March, she asked the bank for a little more funding to open and said she was told she couldn’t get a loan until construction was finished. But when Proietti finished Potluc’s building inspections and licensing in June, the bank still wouldn’t give her money. So she sold her house in Florida to help finance Potluc’s opening.
“I never believed it because it never happened to me,” Proietti said of experiencing racial discrimination from a bank. “Once this is done, I want to have some type of group or association with women so that we can arm people and understand what you have to go through.”
Potluc’s opening was also financed by a $247,000 grant from the Chicago Department of Planning and Development’s neighborhood opportunity fund. The grant financed the restaurant’s interior and exterior renovations, plus a rooftop dining area, according to a statement from Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office.
Johnson said in the statement, “This opening represents the kind of investment we want to see in our neighborhoods — one that supports local entrepreneurs, strengthens our commercial corridors and creates new amenities for the community.”
Make a reservation for Potluc at https://potlucrestaurant.com/.