Just before the pandemic brought the restaurant industry to a grinding halt, XLB, a Chinese spot known for its eponymous soup dumplings, was on a path of expansion that many restaurants aspire to. Owners Jasper Shen and Linh Tran had just opened their second location in Slabtown, and their original North Williams location was going three years strong. In the wake of laying off three-quarters of their staff and scaling back to one location, Shen and Tran decided to shift their focus.
“[We] started to have this discussion of what’s happening in the Portland food world,” Tran says. “What does it look like? What is going to be the
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