Balsan A three-course menu of “aphrodisiac” dishes includes a starter of oysters, cheese, and charcuterie; a choice of steak au poivre or lobster and chicken fricassee; and a chocolate tasting. $69, optional wine pairings are $36; also available Friday-Sunday. 11 E. Walton, 312-646-1400. Blokes & Birds Chef Greg Cannon’s “Aphrodisiac Dinner” includes oysters (half-shell or Rockefeller), Muscovy duck, and butter-poached lobsters. $50; $25 extra gets you beverage pairings like Young’s Double Chocolate Stout, Fleur Chardonnay, and Timmerman’s Framboise Lambic....

Mike Sula Tomato and pistachio gelato If I had tasted it sooner I’d have submitted the gelato that they’re pushing at J.P. Graziano for last week’s Best of Chicago issue. Launched a few weeks ago for the great Italian imports/sandwich shop’s 76th anniversary, it’s the result of a yearlong collaboration between Jim Graziano and Baume & Brix chef Ben Roche. Graziano supplies the flavorings: roasted pistachios, neroli bitter orange extract, cocoa nibs, unsweetened blood orange juice, and Campari tomatoes—to name a few....

The elevated train thrums overhead. Every sidewalk grease patch and water stain starts to look like dried puke. Trash blows down Chicago Avenue; condo dwellers hail cabs. The sky darkens. The overgrown children of River North rub empty stomachs, wet cracked lips. Stoplights change, a lime squeezes into a bottle of Corona, a round of shots is ordered. A hungry city wonders: Who is Billy Dec? A general theme pervades: it’s tiny and it’s not very good....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From the mid- to late 60s, Forma was one of Brazil’s best record labels, releasing top-notch bossa nova with a progressive bent. Among the artists in its catalog are Baden Powell, Quarteto em Cy, Moacir Santos, Deodato, and Carlos Lyra. I had no idea O Têrço had also cut music for Forma until Brazilian reissue label Discobertas released a pair of titles by the band in late 2010....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About 15 years ago, Philip Kraus, cofounder of Light Opera Works in Evanston, was sifting through the Northwestern University music library when he stumbled upon a 1928 Hungarian operetta titled The Duchess of Chicago. Kraus had never heard of the operetta composed by Emmerich Kalman, but he liked it so much that he decided to produce the first English translation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet did a good job of keeping the forum moving, not an easy task with eleven candidates eager to talk. They covered a range of issues, from President Obama’s stimulus bill to Middle East policies. I thought Jan Donatelli, Tom Geoghegan, and John Fritchey did well, and I was happy to hear all the candidates come out against Mayor Daley’s plan to privatize Midway Airport....

A real argument starter, this documentary by Henriette Mantel and Steven Skrovan considers the life and legacy of Ralph Nader, the tireless public-interest advocate who alienated many of his natural allies when he ran for president in 2000 and 2004. Though filled with talking heads and clocking in at two full hours, it’s thoroughly involving, and its two-part structure explicitly balances Nader’s phenomenal career as an anticorporate gadfly in the 60s and 70s with his role in the election of George W....

Take Off Broadway! Bailiwick reaffirms its dedication to putting naked men onstage with this comedy revue performed by five guys in the altogether (and one woman in clothes). Loosely anchored by a Broadway theme, the theater’s fourth foray into nude musical comedy combines Forbidden Broadway-style musical parodies (“Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” becomes, egregiously, “Don’t Try to Trim ‘Round Your Wiener”) with original songs and sketches reminiscent of tourist-friendly shows about contemporary life such as I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change....

The 50-year-old slugging third baseman is entering her fifth decade of play and showing no signs of slowing down. Lisa Pugh plays in four leagues each summer—16-inch and 12-inch on both coed and women’s teams. “I play south side, north side, west side—anywhere in Chicago. My traveling team takes me all over the midwest.” Raised in Cabrini-Green, Pugh’s been swinging a bat since “I played strike-em-out-against-the-wall as a kid. I like the competitiveness....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “At this point in the chapter, Dawkins pauses to take a swipe at the concepts of omniscience and omnipotence. Before analyzing Dawkins’s comments, I should reveal that I have no great love for either term. The concepts of omniscience and ominpotence are, from my point of view as a student of the Hebrew Bible, Johnny-come-latelies who have little to do with the biblical portrayal of God…....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Based on conversations I’ve had about the film, it seems the most contentious aspect of Cosmopolis, currently playing at the Landmark’s Century Centre and 600 N. Michigan, is that all the characters talk exactly the same way. It doesn’t matter if the person onscreen is a billionaire investor, a security guard, an artist, or a homicidal lunatic: everyone speaks in grammatically correct complete sentences and in full awareness of his or her position in human history....

Zoolander Landmark film, landmark building: Shirley Clarke’s audacious Portrait of Jason, a cornerstone of LGBT filmmaking, screens next Wednesday at the Portage Theater, which was awarded landmark status earlier this month by the City Council Music Box. Jason is the subject of this week’s long review, accompanied by our coverage of the Asian American Showcase at Gene Siskel Film Center. Also recommended this week: About Sunny, a drama about the working-class poor in Las Vegas, with Penelope Ann Miller and Dylan Baker; Fast & Furious 6, the latest installment in the car-porn franchise; Jacquot, Agnes Varda’s 1991 tribute to her husband, director Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg); What Maisie New, a millennial update of the Henry James novel; and Zoolander, the Ben Stiller comedy we’ve been panning for the past 12 years....

“Fate is coming for you like a Jehovah’s Witness,” warns Second City’s 99th main-stage revue, South Side of Heaven, “and you just can’t pretend you’re not at home.” One-third standard Chicago references, one-third current events, and one-third appeal to the inevitable, this smart show is as tenacious as destiny itself but a lot less annoying, delivering rapid-fire comedy with the company’s signature finesse. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the first sketch, Holly Laurent encounters Sam Richardson’s Barack Obama in a dream....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seeing the film was a revelation for my 13-year-old self. The Bed-Stuy milieu bore a certain resemblance to the neighborhoods around the magnet schools I’d attended in West Pullman and Morgan Park. But Brooklyn seemed different than Chicago too. Instead of going home to islands of relative homogeneity at the end of the day to talk smack on other groups amid the safety of our own ethnicity, it seemed that the New Yorkers were in each others’ face 24/7, and an explosion was inevitable....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The piece was about how the United States Golf Association might soon outlaw new clubs with U-shape grooves in favor of the old V-shape. As I understand it, based on looking at a cross-section diagram, where the V-shape groove is as a diamond might cut it, a wedge, a U-shape groove is as a chisel might cut it, a trench....

This is a wild ride in more ways than one. Adapter-director David Catlin takes full advantage of poetic license, ranging freely through both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. The result is a tumbling kaleidoscope of characters: the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Red and White Queens, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the March Hare, the Dormouse, and more. The constants are Alice, of course, and Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll/the White Knight....

Luna Negra rehearsal director Michelle Manzanales has been honored for her choreography elsewhere, but the accomplished, moving Sugar in the Raw is her first piece for the company. Based on interviews and writing exercises with the dancers, the dance for ten opens with a series of brief, intense slow-motion duets that convey inexorable, instinctive, not necessarily sexual attraction and end with one dancer bearing the other up. Set to instrumental music by Gustavo Santaolalla, it manages to be both sorrowful and joyous, delivering along the way many piquant, mysterious but evocative gestures: squeezed-together fingers that burst open as if releasing a seed, thumbs stuck in ears and twisted as the dancer looks up, hands flaring around the face....

The Maid Directed by Sebastian Silva | Written by Silva and Pedro Peirano Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The movie’s opening sequence nicely frames the awkward relationship between Raquel (played with stone-faced impassivity by Catalina Saavedra) and the family she serves. Sitting in the kitchen alone, eating dinner in her uniform, she overhears the family out in the dining room as they whisper conspiratorially, preparing to present her with a birthday cake and gift....

Sometimes you can’t tell when you’re stepping onto a battlefield. Last week a sign at the empty lobby desk of the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, where the posted admission fee is $10, read “Please ring bell for assistance.” Beyond it, the galleries were dark. The elevator wasn’t working, the roof was leaking, and a sign had been taped over a fresh black wound in a wall: “Mold, do not touch....

Presented by the Society for Arts, the 24th Polish Film Festival in America presents new work from Poland and by Polish filmmakers around the world. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Courage This dark fable by writer-director Greg Zglinski recalls the philosophical dramas of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Zanussi, raising complex moral questions but refusing to provide any answers. Two grown brothers—one a college graduate, the other a tradesman—constantly lock horns over how to manage the family business; when they stumble upon a violent incident, they discover just how different they’ve become....