Penny’s Noodle Shop has been a Lakeview institution since 1989 — the kind of place that generations of Chicagoans associate with their first adult apartment, their go-to cheap-dinner rotation, their cooler older sibling who took them there at age 12. Penny herself left Bangkok in 1977, arrived in Chicago with her mother’s recipes and a plan to finish college and go back, and fortunately for the neighborhood, she stayed. The Sheffield and Roscoe location has been drawing regulars with its hot pepper noodles and Thai iced tea for over three decades. Things are not going well at the moment. The Chicago Department of Public Health returned for a canvass re-inspection on April 2, 2026, found the rodent problem it had already flagged was still there, issued a citation, and recorded another Fail.
What the Re-Inspection Found
According to records in the Chicago Department of Public Health food inspection database, the April 2 re-inspection was checking whether the restaurant had corrected violations from an earlier round of inspections. The short answer: not adequately. Inspectors documented 18 rodent droppings still present across the first floor prep area, the dining room, the basement prep area under the stairs and dry storage, under the north wall metal rack shelving in the basement — and also in the ventilation ducts. A citation was issued under Chicago Municipal Code 7-38-020(A).
The ventilation duct finding deserves its own moment of attention. Droppings in ductwork are not a surface-level problem. They indicate rodents have moved into the building’s infrastructure, which requires a more involved remediation than cleaning visible surfaces and calling an exterminator.
The re-inspection also found continued non-compliance with core violations flagged as far back as April 3, 2025 — a full year earlier. Those included bulk food containers not labeled with their common name, plastic and wooden crates still being used as elevation throughout the facility including inside the walk-in cooler and freezers, and excessive grease on floors, walls, and ceiling throughout the first floor cook’s line, under the flat grill, and under the deep fryer. Greased ceiling tiles were also cited. Additional findings from the April 2 visit: holes in walls in the rear dry storage and restrooms that inspectors flagged as pest entry points; exposed foam-like caulk on walls and around pipes that can’t be properly cleaned; a water leak in the basement storage area near the gas meters seeping through walls; food debris in a kitchen ventilation duct; clutter stored on the floor in basement storage creating additional harborage conditions; and a missing backflow prevention device on the utility sink.
A Restaurant With a Recent Closure Already on the Books
This is not the first recent chapter in what has become a sustained inspection story at the Sheffield location. Block Club Chicago reported in late March 2026 that the city had suspended Penny’s food license and closed the restaurant for a rat infestation, along with black mold on the ice machine and unlabeled perishables. At the time, the restaurant posted a statement on its online ordering portal saying it was closed to address health inspection issues through deep cleaning, facility repairs, and professional pest control. The April 2 re-inspection suggests that process has not fully resolved the infestation. The Fail result and citation mean the restaurant remains under active compliance pressure from the health department…