Andersonville Has Some Of Chicago's Best Noodles and Not Enough People Know It
Rich Wang named his restaurant after the Taipei neighborhood where his family lived. The beef noodle soup tastes like he never left.
The name comes from Mínyǒulǐ, the military dependents' village in Taipei where chef Rich Wang's family lived after the Chinese Civil War. That context matters before you sit down, because juàncūn cooking — the hybrid cuisine that emerged when families from across mainland China arrived in Taiwan and combined their regional traditions with local ingredients — is the specific and disappearing thing Minyoli is trying to preserve. Wang is not attempting to represent all of Taiwanese food. He is documenting a particular chapter of it, with handmade noodles and a kitchen shaped by Boka, Fat Rice, and a noodle-pulling certification earned in Lanzhou.
That precision shows up in every bowl.
The noodles are made in-house in two shapes: a thinner noodle built for gripping sauce and a wider ribbon that holds what Taiwanese cooks call QQ texture — springy, with just enough chew to tell you the dough was handled correctly. The beef noodle soup is the reason to come first. The broth is dark and looks serious before you taste it, and when you taste it the depth confirms what the color promised. Rich, enveloping, savory in the way that makes you slow down involuntarily. The beef is tender enough that it offers no resistance. The pickled mustard greens cut through exactly when you need them to. This is a comfort dish at the highest possible level of execution.
The cold sesame noodles are what to order alongside it. Cooling where the soup is warming, the Sichuan spice arrives with that specific numbing quality that makes your mouth recalibrate rather than just burn. Refreshing is not usually the word for a noodle dish but it applies here.
The fried chicken comes as nuggets, dusted with tart plum powder, expertly fried with a sweetness that makes them genuinely hard to stop eating. There is not a miss on the menu, not one I have found across multiple visits. The kitchen has a point of view and applies it consistently, which is a rarer thing than it should be.
Minyoli works across all three meals. Brunch brings its own set of mash-ups worth exploring, including fresh soy milk and youtiao that lean directly into the Taiwanese morning tradition rather than trying to translate it for a Western brunch audience.
The drinks situation for sober diners is worth calling out specifically. The cocktail menu is not heavy on NA beer, but the Taiwanese mocktails are genuinely interesting rather than obligatory. The night market fruitstand is worth ordering. The house-made sodas, including a sour plum that is exactly as good as it sounds, make non-alcoholic drinking here feel like a choice rather than a fallback.
The space is blonde wood, minimal, with small touches throughout — including cat-patterned curtains that reference the strays Wang grew up around in his Taipei neighborhood. A small bar runs along one side. Big windows face Clark Street, which on a good afternoon in Andersonville is some of the best people-watching in the city. This is one of my favorite neighborhoods in Chicago, and Minyoli is now one of my favorite restaurants in it.
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