Chef Louis Lin said he wanted the chicken in two minutes and 10 seconds. A cook met his gaze across the open kitchen and asked, bemused, “Two minutes and 10 seconds?” Lin replied it was now closer to a minute-45. He smirked. They laughed. But a minute-45 later, Lin was wiping the rim of a plate with a surgically folded napkin, artfully twirling a sidecar of celeriac slaw with a pair of forceps, and passing a tray holding the golden half chicken and its accoutrements to a server, solemn as an Olympian handing off a relay baton. Then he adjusted the rubber ducky sitting on his ticket printer.

From the chef’s counter at Xiao Ye, the restaurant Lin opened last September with partner and co-owner Jolyn Chen, who runs the front of house, I watched a cook in a cutoff Miller High Life T-shirt vigorously work a pan of rigatoni all’Amatriciana—an homage to Lin’s former employer, Santa Monica’s pasta mecca Felix. Lin, who happened to be wearing a Felix T-shirt that night, spread the chubby noodles across a piece of ornate Goodwill china and handed it off with a sprinkle of pecorino Romano.

The fine-diningish operation—wear flip-flops or a suit, or both—hums with a dose of humility in an airy, eclectic room made triangular by Sandy Boulevard. Service could be described as seamless, though certain seams are smartly made visible, like the staff wearing their personalities on their mismatched T-shirt sleeves. They serve “first generation american [sic] food,” as the giant sign out front indicates. Lin and Chen, a couple, are both Taiwanese American. They grew up submersed in LA’s rich blend of cuisines and worked in some of its most notable restaurants, including Osteria Mozza, and spent a few years between Washington, DC’s Michelin-starred restaurants Pineapple and Pearls and Rose’s Luxury before landing in Portland.

Their menu doesn’t cling to a nationality or theme. Instead, it’s driven by lived experience, specifically their first-generation American experience—informed and shaped by their identities but, crucially, not dictated by them. In practice, that means masa and chipotle peppers, truffles, hearts of palm, and Taiwanese black vinegar make cameos on the menu.

The mini madeleines you see on every table deliciously exemplify the approach. Japanese mochi rice flour and Mexican masa are freshly baked into the dainty French pastries. They’re chewy-crisp corn bread in microcosm with a winking American nostalgia for corn chips dusted in flavor-blasting powders (jalapeño, in this case). One cook spends most of their night plucking them hot from a mold and standing them upright in a schmear of palm-sugar butter.

Of course, many restaurants combine diverse influences and ingredients. New American cuisine is the inept phrase we have for this, a term first prescribed to American chefs breaking away from French nouvelle of the ’60s and ’70s. This was Chez Panisse, farm-to-table, California cuisine. But it grew awkwardly from place-based cooking to include the hollow appropriation of buzzy ingredients and techniques used to add an exotic pop of color. This was Wolfgang Puck, then Guy Fieri, but also the French Laundry. Burrata, harissa, miso paste. At its worst, the approach flattens ingredients, and in turn the people they represent. A 2023 polemic against the phrase in Bon Appétit argued for “American, and” instead: “Filling in that blank is exactly where the promise lies.”

Xiao Ye fills in the blank with a defiant, albeit hospitable refusal to box itself in. What sets it apart from the sea of new American restaurants flooding America is, quite simply, a palpably intimate connection to the food it’s serving.

Lin likes to push very, very simple dishes to the edge. When it hits, it hits, like the madeleines or a devilish pair of tempura shrimp, swimming in prawn-head juice profanely marbled with a greasy-salty egg yolk sauce. Chicken hearts roasted and served with a pan jus, adorned with nothing but a piece of toast, were gutsy. But alone they left me wanting. A delicately fried sardine landed similarly: bold and exciting in theory, lonely in practice, like part of a spread that wasn’t there, though it is an impressively fried little fish.

Between these carnal delights and the mains, noodles are a must. For Romans, pasta is sacrosanct. When taking up a canonical recipe, you don’t so much as misplace a clove of garlic or put onions where they don’t belong. You just don’t. Which is likely why Lin produces an “almost classic” rigatoni all’Amatriciana, cloaking bouncy, housemade pasta in tomatoes scented with guanciale and warmed by a chorus of chiles (this might be where he breaks from tradizione). Just as much a menu fixture are Jolyn’s Favorite Noodles V.1, wheat noodles tossed in a fitful tangle of Taiwanese condiments, a slurpable sesame-hued dish Lin is said to make for Chen after a long night at the restaurant, a midnight snack, or xiao ye in Mandarin.  

At the back of the menu are several multipiece spreads based around a larger cut of meat or fish. A fancy Japanese snapper is grilled whole over charcoal and marinated fantastically with pasilla and chipotle, but it’s rife with itsy bones, and its pedestrian potatoes fall flat like home fries despite producing a cheese pull that would satisfy all of TikTok.

Then there’s that precision-timed chicken. A server wearing a World of Warcraft shirt brought the bird, an event that consists of five plates, neatly aligned on a wooden tray. Dishes of pickles, Kewpie mayo slaw, and a humble baked sweet potato underpinned the main event, which was visibly crisp and a shimmering honey color, but ostensibly just a half chicken perched on a neat dome of white rice. After arranging the spread, the server raised a chrome teapot high and doused the chicken with a generous table-side pour of thick jus, which incorporated the famed S&B Golden Curry sauce mix and wafted the distinct zip of bouillon into the air. Japanese curry rice, parceled to the nines.

It’s a landmark example of the restaurant’s ideas being brought to bear on the food. It’s high-low. It’s a taste-memory. It’s remade to fit the chef’s predilections, but with an unmissable reverence for its muse. It tastes and looks like a home-cooked meal, and it tastes and looks like a Michelin-starred meal. And it relishes in the tension between those forces.

Gelato is for dessert, perhaps with an encore of madeleines. Fior di latte is the flavor you want, translating from Italian as “flower of milk.” It’s starkly white, simply milk and sugar, churned. (Sampling the fior di latte gelato is how you suss out if a gelato maestro knows what’s up.) Lin dares to crust the ivory ice cream with Okinawa brown sugar, kokuto, which is distilled from pure sugarcane juice. In a shining pedestal bowl, the two meld in subversive bliss.