Xni-Pec Restaurant Xel-Ha Then in January, Dudley Nieto (Chapulin, Adobo Grill) opened an upscale Yucatecan restaurant on the north side: Xel-Ha (pronounced “shell ha”). When I first visited last month it still hadn’t had its grand opening. Says Nieto, “It takes time to train our staff to make these traditional recipes.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been to both restaurants several times over the past two months, and each has seemed better each visit....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week’s Omnivorous is about Chaihanna, the Buffalo Grove Uzbek restaurant run by sisters-in-law Olga Berrin and Natalya Berrina. As far as I can tell, it’s the area’s only restaurant devoted to the food of this ancient intersection on the Silk Road. Sure, you can order samsas and damlama at Russian Tea Time, but those few dishes can’t begin to represent the fascinating amalgam of ethnic influences in the food of Uzbekistan....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wayne Coyne, front man for Oklahoma City’s most famous weirdos, the Flaming Lips, sets sail this afternoon on a brief five-stop record store tour to promote the band’s latest merchandising oddity, and the Fri 12/20 stop just so happens to be at Chicago’s very own Permanent Records. The Lips are no strangers to selling out-of-the-box records, the best-known example being Zaireeka, their 1997 long-player that requires four separate stereos to get the full experience....

For the past couple of years Douglas McCombs has been performing around town with the latest version of his long-running project Brokeback. While the music’s evocation of the expansiveness, twang, and parched tone of the American West remains, McCombs has been pushing more explicitly toward rock. When McCombs first started playing as Brokeback in 1995 he was clearly inspired by the bass duo Mike Watt started with his ex-wife Kira Roessler called Dos, and before long Brokeback became a duo with the involvement of onetime jazz bassist Noel Kupersmith; eventually it become a trio with the addition of jazz drummer Tim Mulvenna....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Danny Brown’s Old debuted on Spotify yesterday (read Leor Galil’s review), and it’s the only thing I’ve listened to for the past 24 hours. But since we’ve already featured Brown on 12 O’Clock Track so many times, I figured I’d shine the spotlight on one of the album’s producers. The beats on the second half of Old are phenomenal, a mixture of Swizz Beatz and Lex Luger’s skeletal, metallic crunk, hyphy’s purple purview, and dubstep’s titanic lurch....

This retrospective series runs May 4 through June 10 at the Music Box. Following are programs through May 10; for a full schedule visit www.musicboxtheatre.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RCalifornia Split Altman’s masterful 1974 study of the psychology of the compulsive gambler. Elliott Gould, loose, jocular, and playful, and George Segal, neurotic, driven, and desperate, are really two halves of the same personality as they move from bet to bet, game to game, until they arrive for the big showdown in Reno....

I’ve been banging the drum for Pipeworks, the nanobrewery founded by Beejay Oslon and Gerrit Lewis, for more than two years now—ever since I sampled their Russian imperial stout, Abduction, at the Goose Island Stout Fest in March 2010. I wrote about their Kickstarter campaign that December, and for the Reader‘s 2011 Best of Chicago issue I declared them the Best Craft Brewery That Doesn’t Exist Yet. Well, now Pipeworks exists: they’ve got a brewery at 1675 N....

A live band and a dozen tap dancers prove a potent concoction in “Mixology,” Chicago Tap Theatre’s fifth-anniversary show. Tapping by artistic director Mark Yonally usually provides percussion for jazz quartet the Rhythm Four, but a drummer fills in for him here, and together the band’s vocalist and three instrumentalists creditably cover everything from Gershwin standards and Charlie Parker to Portishead, Sia, and Suzanne Vega. The onstage musicians make company favorites like Glory Box and Torch Trio (set to Peggy Lee songs) really pop....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gimmicky? Maybe, but the ones on offer at a preview tasting at the store yesterday were also pretty good. Out of the 12 or so sweet and savory cupcakes, the one with maple frosting and candied bacon was my favorite–sort of like dipping bacon in maple syrup, but better. The BLT, with ranch “frosting,” tiny tomato slices, micro basil, and bacon crumbles, had a nice balance of flavors, and I might have liked it even more if I liked ranch....

Of all the restaurants to open here over the past year, few have been as hotly anticipated, closely scrutinized, and avidly gossiped about as Michael Altenberg’s organic pizzeria Crust, otherwise known as Crust Eat Real. Much of the advance publicity, including a feature story in the Reader on March 9, discussed Altenberg’s association with Charles Foulkes, who bakes naturally leavened, artisanal bread, also under the name Crust, or, more formally, Crust for Bread, and who would be baking the bread for the restaurant on the premises....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago Slam Works is crossing borders with a new bilingual show, “In Any Tongue” (Sat 7/21, 8 PM, Vittum Theatre, 1012 N. Noble, chicagoslamworks.com). Three slam poetry teams, two German and one American, will perform together simultaneously in German and English. The concept originated last year during CSW’s celebration of slam poetry’s 25th birthday, when Chicago’s Speak’Easy Ensemble performed a short set with Frankfurt’s Word Alert....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I could expurgate a single trendy cliché from common usage it would be the tired . . . trope of throwing around the words [Katie Roiphe]. . . . The main problem with the in-your-face [Katie Roiphe] talk is the showy, childish hint of self-congratulation at one’s own utter lack of puritanism. [Katie Roiphe] revels in [Katie Roiphe’s] plain-talking refusal of ....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oh my god, that is just, like, so not true. The state’s TIF act is one of my favorite reads. I keep a copy of it by my bed and read a passage every night before I go to sleep. It’s terse, transparent, and immediately comprehensible to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of English. “‘Payment in lieu of taxes’ means those estimated tax revenues from real property in a redevelopment project area derived from real property that has been acquired by a municipality which according to the redevelopment project or plan is to be used for a private use which taxing districts would have received had a municipality not acquired the real property and adopted tax increment allocation financing and which would result from levies made after the time of the adoption of tax increment allocation financing to the time the current equalized value of real property in the redevelopment project area exceeds the total initial equalized value of real property in said area....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Regular readers probably know I don’t write about jazz singers very often, and that’s because I’m not that crazy about them. I enjoy Ella Fitzgerald scatting or Sarah Vaughan twisting her silken voice into all kinds of crazy or the cool croon of Johnny Hartman as much as the next person, but these days there aren’t too many singers working in the tradition that I would willingly turn to....

What if the final conflict between Christ and Satan took place not on the battlefield of Armageddon but on The Jerry Springer Show? Would this face-off be must-see TV? That’s the concept behind Jerry Springer–The Opera, the controversial British hit finally receiving its U.S. premiere in a terrific non-Equity production. Intrigued by why anyone would watch Springer’s sleazy show, much less appear on it, composer Richard Thomas and librettist Stewart Lee suggest that the on-air encounters between a long procession of losers reflect the eternal struggle between good and evil, salvation and damnation, temptation and faith....

RadiusSleeping Wide Awake (Moment Sound) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recently Norwood combined forces with a small army of similarly minded DJs and producers from around town, including Kenny Keys and DJ Moppy, to form a collective called Beyond Luck. The group has decided to debut its music in long-form mixes rather than in discrete tracks. This first one, simply titled Sampler Podcast Vol....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The American Conservative‘s blog Eunomia, by U. of C. grad student Daniel Larison, is one of the best blogs I’ve come across in a long time: intelligent without being arrogant, serious without being stuffy. It’s also a pleasure to read in the strictest sense–he writes clear, confident sentences without decoration or bluster, which is all the more impressive for a blog (see also Ben Dueholm on Larison)....

New Too MEXICAN/SOUTHWESTERN | BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER: MONDAY-SATURDAY | BYO BAR/LOUNGE, ENGLISH/IRISH/SCOTTISH | LUNCH: FRIDAY-SUNDAY; DINNER: SEVEN DAYS | SATURDAY & SUNDAY BRUNCH | OPEN LATE: SATURDAY TILL 3, OTHER NIGHTS TILL 2 AMERICAN, BURGERS | LUNCH, DINNER: SEVEN DAYS | RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Owner Jim Andrews struck a rich vein of publicity when community members—including his alderman—objected to his irreverent approach of employing ex-offenders serving Chain Gang Chili Dogs, Paroled Pizza Puffs, and Probation Burgers....

All movies are free and will be screened by video projection. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » R Akeelah and the Bee Coming on the heels of Spellbound and Bee Season, this small gem (2006) about a South Central LA girl with a gift for spelling restores luster to the family genre. Keke Palmer gives a breakout performance as the title character, whose prodigious talent is nearly deep-sixed by her lack of self-esteem and her harried, widowed mom (Angela Bassett), who dismisses spelling bees as an extracurricular activity they can’t afford....

Veteran iO director Jason R. Chin impressively reimagines the movie-improv form, even recapitulating the cinema experience: before the show a performer displays film trivia on posters and popcorn is handed out. Then, with a title suggestion, Chin and the cast–who’ve been together since fall 2006–rev up their well-oiled comedy-making machine. Chin handles the lights and cleverly scores scenes with actual movie soundtracks and pop classics. Onstage actors imaginatively parody genre conventions for characters and plots as offstage actors yell camera directions like “crosscut to see what she sees” and “overhead shot” (characters are lifted and pointed at the crowd)....