No. 29 - First Generation American Food

Our restaurant concept

How we got to our concept felt kind of like dating as an adult. It feels impossible to know when it became official, official; at some point, you kinda just pick a date that makes sense and call it your anniversary date 😅. We knew nailing down our name would only represent the first part of our identity; for the other half, we needed a solid concept, and it had to be digestible, understandable, and, most importantly, didn’t sell us short.

From my scraggly memory, we were sitting in front of our laptops, working through our deck. We had finally landed on Xiao Ye as our restaurant name and were moving onto describing (to ourselves) our concept; we were trying to formulate an elevator pitch for us to quickly explain what food we were serving and the style of service we wanted to give. At this point, we weren’t really sure what we wanted to do, but we knew what it wasn’t: we knew it wasn’t going to be as simple as saying our concept is an upscale casual Italian joint or a neighborhood sandwich shop. There were three big boxes it needed to check:

1. Louis didn’t want to be boxed in with food and wanted our restaurant to feel more open-ended.

2. Like how we approached our restaurant name, it had to feel personal and something we intimately know.

3. It had to fuel us creatively.

We started thinking about food categories/cuisines that already existed and quickly realized how little we resonated with any of them, at least not entirely. If you look at Yelp or Google’s categories when they list a restaurant by their cuisine, you’ll likely see words like: Eclectic, New American, Fusion, Pan-Asian, and Farm-to-Table, to name a few. The closest thing, for us, would be Eclectic or New American, but even I don’t really know what those categories actually mean.

We also thought deeply about what the current restaurant landscape was in the country AND in Portland. Asking ourselves, what’s already existing and how we can put something out into the world without adding more unnecessary noise? Why do we need to exist? What will we be offering to our community? Is there a hole in the industry where we naturally fit in? What makes us special? Heady, right?! 🫠