Before Minyoli became a Taiwanese restaurant in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood, it was the name of the military dependents’ village where chef Rich Wang and his family had resided for decades. In 1949, the Kuomintang government established hundreds of these villages called juan cun 眷村, to house KMT military personnel and their families who fled to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War. Wang grew up in the Minyoli juan cun for the first nine years of his life before life in the village became untenable. By then, many juan cun had been dismantled, its residents spread out and relocated to other parts of town, and Wang and his family were among the few to witness the last few years of life in juan cun. Today, the restaurant he has opened with his cousin X Wang, bears the food memories and familiar flavors of juan cun cuisine, a cuisine shaped by the diversity of residents who fled from all parts of China and brought their favorite dishes with them. Today, life in juan cun is a distant memory but many of the dishes shared in juan cun, translated over time through a Taiwanese lens, have become a meaningful part of Taiwanese cuisine and an indelible part of the Taiwanese story.

So this is a family business inspired by family experiences. How exactly are you two related?
X: We’re paternal cousins and our paternal grandparents are the ones who ended up in Minyoli juan cun. My dad is the eldest. Rich’s dad is the youngest. I grew up in the U.S. I’m full ABC (American Born Chinese), but I also grew up in Southern California in LA where there’s an extremely vibrant Taiwanese community. So this is a deep part of me as well. This project was a chance for the two of us to reconnect. I was in Atlanta previously, so I moved to Chicago for this.
There aren’t many in our generation who knows and can recall life in juan cun. What were those years like?
R: I think juan cun is unique in that it is cultures, identities, and languages from Mainland China. Just the accents alone are insane. Our neighbors, one is from Beijing, the others is from Suzhou. You are trained to understand so many crazy dialects from a young age. My family is from Henan. So they’re all quite different. In terms of food, there’s a lot of sharing. There’s really a sense of community there.
I remember specifically that there was one of our neighbors named Zha Ye Ye. He came alone at the age of 16 as a dressmaker. He had tagged along with one of the [Kuomintang] generals. He stayed single and a dressmaker all of his life. His house is just a terracotta room. We’d always go visit him. He was just a feature of our community.
We had a noodle restaurant right below us, and it was owned by another Northern Chinese family. Next to it was a barber from Shandong. Across from us was a Beijing family. They did jing ju 京剧 (Beijing opera) all the time. We hated it! It was so loud. They also beat their children in public.
There was a sense of boundaries too, because the language, the architecture, the people change [outside of juan cun]. In my generation, it’s not as bad, but in my dad’s generation, if you stepped into the wrong neighborhood, you might get beat up. You know, the sense of territory is very strong in juan cun.
Rich, you’ve worked in many Michelin starred restaurants and your cooking experience is vast. Were there unique challenges to opening your own place that you did not foresee?
R: I think the non-food related part was the most challenging. I know food. I’ve been cooking for a while. I can troubleshoot food. It’s really hard for me to troubleshoot people. There’s employer-employee relationships, also vendors. Plumbing…and sourcing ingredients, that’s something specific to our community. There is a general Chinese supplier chain in Chicago but Taiwanese-specific products such as suan cai 酸菜 (pickled mustard greens), such as hei dou jiang you 黑豆醬油 (Taiwanese black bean soy sauce), all those things are not readily available. We actually had to go through the length of becoming a fake supermarket to get some of the supplies because they refuse to deal with restaurants so we had to import and entire pallet of black bean Taiwanese soy sauce.
That’s insane and really smart actually! I can’t even imagine!
X: Because we were consistently buying out the entire Chicagoland area and the grocery stores here don’t cater to Taiwanese products so they’re not restocking it at the speed that we need them to be.
R: All those are unforeseen and on the food end, it’s hard to please everybody, especially Taiwanese Americans because there’s so few Taiwanese restaurants, especially in Chicago.
X: We’re one of three.
R: So when you come out with a Taiwanese tagline, people flood to you and brings with them years of disappointment and frustration as a diaspora, as an immigrant, as a Taiwanese American; the frustration of being misidentified, misunderstood, misappropriated. All those things, they’re bringing to our restaurant and if we don’t live up to it, a hundred percent of the time…
X: they will make their opinions quite clear.
R: I thought that by opening a Taiwanese restaurant I would join the community in bringing awareness about Taiwanese culture but instead, I almost feel like I made myself a target. It’s stressful.
X: There’s a lot of pent up lack of access. We get mistaken for Thai all the time, we’ve been written up as a Korean noodle restaurant. Rich was asked if he was Vietnamese before an interview at some point.
How much research did you have to do outside of your own culinary experiences to develop your menu?
R: A lot. I think every single dish we continue to go through iterations and changes. That’s also who I am as a cook. Every dish I do my best and put out the version I think is great. I listen to feedback and depending on the season, I change things. So we’re constantly doing research with an almost academic fervor.
X: We definitely deep dive. We want to know the history. We want to know the origins, the provenance of the ingredients to the degree that we’re able to and to be as honest and careful about those things as we can while trying to sidestep the whole trap of authenticity.

Using your beef noodle soup as an example, there are so many variations of beef noodle soup in Taiwan, there’s no real authentic beef noodle soup. The concept of the beef noodle soup in and of itself is a mashup of all the different influences in Taiwan. So when you were developing your version, what were some of the things you wanted to hit?
R: So beef noodle soup, we have two kinds, one is the consommé qing dun and the other is the hong shao red braise. For the hong shao, the boundaries that we set for ourselves was I want to make sure the doubanjiang flavor is there because that is the Sichuan origin of hong shao niu ruo mian [red braised beef noodle soup] and also, the soy sauce has to be good because soy sauce is the main part of hong shao. And also, an important part of hong shao is also tang se, caramel color. We make our own caramel color from rock sugar. Those three are the only boundaries we set for ourselves. The rest, I’m trying to hit people with umami. That is my goal.
I read that you add pineapple cores into your broth for a little bit of fruitiness and acid. Is that one of those changes that came down the line or did you always have that as part of the recipe?
R: Yeah so for consommé, it is routine in Taiwan to add some kind of vegetable or fruit to add sweetness. That goes for qing dun 清燉 or even Tainan beef noodle soup. Now if you go to Tainan, which is the capital of beef in Taiwan, they add some kind of fruit in addition to just onion and daikon. We definitely have all those in our consommé as well, but I was looking for something that was also unique. I want to make my own mark. We just so happen to have a lot of pineapple cores because we make pineapple pies in-house. We have a lot of cores that we put in our broth instead of the jam because there’s a lot of flavor in them but the texture is not great for jam. It adds a sweetness that is unique.
What are some of the more obscure juan cun dishes that you’re hoping to highlight or revitalize?
X: We did Lion’s Head shi zi tou 獅子頭. It’s hard to find in a restaurant. It’s really something you only find on people’s home dinner tables right? Like you’re gonna eat it because somebody at home made it. It’s not a dish you see around. We do seasonal specials monthly, where we try to highlight juan cun and also other parts of Taiwan’s multifaceted cuisine.
R: One aspect of our appetizers is lu wei 滷味. Lu wei is pervasive in Taiwan, but it actually came out of juan cun. We are passionate about lu wei. We make our own lu zhi 滷汁 (braise marinade) and we get the best ingredients that we can get to braise.
X: That’s a deep reflection of our family because that’s something both our families would make. That’s the classic road trip snack or the daily item that’s packed in our lunch.
X, having lived in a large Taiwanese diaspora like LA, did you have any reservations about opening in an area with a smaller group of Taiwanese Americans?
X: I think it’s a mixed bag. You’re excited because we get to finally do our food. We’re also living in the U.S., it’s a racist country. It’s just a matter of being prepared. Sometimes it’s challenging but there [haven’t] been any scenarios where we haven’t been able to get the story through. People are very receptive. In the beginning, we hired a PR company because we were discussing like, nobody knows what Taiwanese food is. And so, who is going to come? Nobody is going to come to a Taiwanese noodle restaurant because they don’t know what it is, and we were extremely wrong about that. It’s true, nobody knew what Taiwanese food was but they came regardless. We’ve been very lucky that this community has been so receptive and hungry for both our food and our stories, our histories.
We’ve only been open since May and we have noticed that we have regulars now. We have noticed that we have to do less explanation now. It’s starting to accumulate; people are starting to learn things. They’ve read up on us. They’ve been prompted to study and find out more about Taiwan because they’re interested. I’ve had tables where this is their first time here and they know what they want to order already.
Minyoli Taiwanese Noodles is located in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood, specializing in Taiwanese noodles and juancun cuisine. Visit them at 5420 N Clark St, Chicago, Illinois 60640.
Website: https://www.minyolichicago.com/
Instagram: @minyoli.chicago
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