When Jasper Shen was broke and living in New York City, he and a friend would sometimes go to Joe's Shanghai, the famous Chinatown restaurant, for a plate of seafood noodles and four orders of the signature soup dumplings, or xiaolongbao.

Now, nearly a decade later, Shen hopes to bring that experience to Portland. Before the end of the year, the former Aviary co-chef will open XLB -- the universal food blogger shorthand for xiaolongbao -- a slim, counter-service restaurant in the former Lardo North location on North Williams Avenue.

"Authentic" can be a loaded word, but after taking an early look at the menu, it's the one that comes to mind. This isn't Americanized Chinese food. The menu is Chinese-Chinese, with several dishes you'd be hard-pressed to find outside of Beaverton.

"I'm just making a Chinese restaurant," Shen says. "I'm not doing any fusion. I'm not doing plays on plays of plays. My whole goal is to make food that if my mom comes to visit, she's doesn't give me too hard of time."

That means seafood and black-bean noodles, traditional steamed baos stuffed with hoisin duck or pork and cabbage and a handful of stir fries made with mushrooms, Chinese celery, yu choy and other less-commonly-seen vegetables from the Portland Farmers Market. There will be draft beer, wine and "weird sodas and other non-alcoholic drinks from the Asian market," but no cocktails, Shen says.

But mostly it means XLB. Soup dumplings, made from thin dough wrapped around pork and a porky aspic that melts into broth when steamed, are most popular in and around Shanghai, though their popularity stateside has been bolstered by a Taiwanese chain, Din Tai Fung, with locations in Southern California, the Bay Area and Seattle, helped inspire Shen to open XLB.

Born in Maryland, Shen grew up in the Chicago suburbs, where his uncles ran Chinese restaurants with Americanized menus -- beef and broccoli, kung pao chicken. He remembers making 7 and 7 cocktails for customers when he was 10. After receiving a business degree from the University of Illinois, he moved to New York, where he cooked at celebrated restaurants including Aquavit and Jean-Georges.

After moving to Portland in 2010, Shen, Kat Whitehead and Sarah Pliner opened Aviary, a sparse restaurant with creative small plates and fine-dining aspirations. Shen first presented his vision for a straight-up Chinese restaurant in a pop-up series at Aviary. Shen left the restaurant in 2014, the same year he and Whitehead had their first child, a daughter. Whitehead is now the R&D Manager at Salt & Straw.

For Shen, soup dumplings represent a welcome turn away from fine dining.

"At the heart it's just a dumpling: meat, dough, broth," he says. "You're impressing people, but not with fancy plating, or some fine-dining touch. Your skin's gotta be good, your meat's gotta be tasty and you have to have enough soup."

"When you screw up the simple stuff, that's when people notice."

XLB should open before the year's end at 4090 N. Williams Ave.

-- Michael Russell