XLB

Xiaolongbao is the organizing principle at XLB, the north Portland restaurant that Jasper Shen opened in January 2017 on N Williams Ave in the Boise neighborhood. The menu is deliberately short and dumpling-forward: soup dumplings anchor the offering, supported by baozi, buns, noodles, and greens. That restraint is a statement of intent. Rather than spreading across the full breadth of Chinese regional cooking, the kitchen commits to doing a narrow range of things with consistency.

The dining room seats around 48 guests, which keeps the operation at a scale where quality control over pleated, broth-filled dumplings remains manageable. Shen, a second-generation Chinese chef, later partnered with Linh Tran to open a second location in Slabtown, but the Williams Ave original established the reputation. Dishes such as Shanghai pork and shrimp noodles, beef ho fun, pork and cabbage baozi, and popcorn chicken round out a menu where most items land in an accessible price range, making this one of the more approachable options in Portland for this style of cooking.

The soup dumplings drew the most sustained attention from local press, and in 2020 Willamette Week readers placed XLB second in the publication's "Best Chinese Restaurant" poll. For a city where Chinese food has historically received less critical coverage than the Pacific Northwest's farm-to-table scene, that kind of reader recognition carries weight. The Williams Ave address also puts it within north Portland's broader dining corridor, where foot traffic from the neighborhood supports a regular clientele rather than a destination-only crowd.