Bright skies, sunshine you can feel in your bones—the days of summer are finally here, and with them comes the hankering to eat outdoors, whether in a garden courtyard, on a glittering riverfront terrace, or on a see-and-be-seen rooftop patio. For our annual Alfresco guide we’ve combed our listings to find some 50 great spots for outdoor dining (and drinking, of course). F 8.5 | S 7 | A 7.3 | $$$ (6 reports)Dinner: seven days | Sunday brunch | Open late: Friday & Saturday till 11...

Double Li Double Li is named for chef-owners Ben Li and Wan Cai Li, but for fans of Szechuan cuisine it also signifies that we’ve doubled our options for mouth-tingling, authentically aggressive specialties from the region. Here are Szechuan dumplings, delectably cartilaginous pig’s ear, and—my favorite Double Li starter—Szechuan tripe with finely minced celery as a textural counterpoint. Fish in chile broth is terrific, the fillet meltingly tender and the chile oil hot enough to start one thinking of the firehouse a few doors east....

Yto Barrada started out as a political scientist, studying the roadblocks between Israel and the West Bank. But she found herself “taking more photographs than notes,” she recalls in a 2006 interview. “There were lots of things with humour, poetry—what do you do with that in a dissertation? You’re supposed to get rid of it!” So she switched to art and went home to Morocco, which has border tensions of its own centered around the migrants who often drown trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain....

I can’t even tell you how many times people have asked me, “When is Zara coming to Chicago?” The massive Spanish retailer is beloved by budget-minded style hunters for its dedication to cosmopolitan style and up-to-the-last-second mimicking of street trends—designs can hit the stores just two weeks off the drawing board. And now I can finally say it has arrived in Chicago… sort of. You’ll have to trek out to Old Orchard mall in Skokie, at least until sometime next year, when two locations are slated to open downtown....

Vella Cafe For the past few years Sara Voden and Melissa Yen have been selling what may be the finest sandwiches in Chicago from a small patch of grass in Lincoln Park. Their grill at the Green City Market produced wondrous items like a grilled Moroccan chicken panini and the French Toast, whose name is a total undersell: it’s Red Hen country white stuffed with honey-orange cream cheese, baked in a custard, and pressed on a panini grill....

Fish and absinthe is the unlikely union at the heart of the Savoy, a narrow, nautically decked spot that replaced the ill-fated La Fonda del Gusto, a midscale, BYOB Mexican restaurant that enforced a bizarre restriction on the amount of booze one could carry in. The only things restricting a wide range of alcohol intake at the Savoy—even beyond absinthe—will be the size of your tolerance and budget. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Baladoche Baladoche specializes in waffles, but not just any waffles—Belgian zucker waffles, about the size of your hand and filled with pearl sugar chips, which look like something a storybook mouse would put in its tea. The pearls melt a bit during cooking, providing little pockets of crunchy sweetness that make syrup superfluous. Toppings include cinnamon sugar, chocolate, jam, Nutella, or the house gelato, though two small scoops of the last made the waffle too soggy for my taste....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Tuesday I went to Doc Films for back-to-back screenings of Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1930) and Olivier Assayas’s Clean (2004), two films with very little in common. It was the sort of double feature I’ve programmed countless times at home, skipping across great distances in film history because I can’t decide which area I want to study in depth....

A year ago, Miguel del Valle was running for mayor. His resume was outstanding. He’d risen from blue-collar roots on Chicago’s near-northwest side to the state senate, where he was a leading liberal voice for 20 years. Five years as city clerk after that had schooled him on the workings of Chicago government. He was widely regarded as smart, industrious, and honest. His chances of winning were zero. The who’s who of big donors to Emanuel also included Steve Jobs and his wife ($50,000 each), and Donald Trump ($50,000)....

In the Mitchell Report McNamee stated that Clemens and his wife had attended a party, apparently a barbecue, at the home of confessed steroid user Jose Canseco, and that he saw Clemens, Canseco, and a third person having a conversation. Clemens has denied he attended the party, and as evidence he’s produced: a receipt from a golf course near Canseco’s house that puts him in its clubhouse that morning; video of announcers for the Toronto Blue Jays, Clemens’s team at the time, discussing Canseco’s party and mentioning that Clemens wasn’t in attendance; and an affidavit from Canseco, himself, stating that he doesn’t recall Clemens being at the party....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It sucks when critics don’t like you, but it is absolutely terrifying to contemplate the idea that your most talented colleagues secretly hate you. It’s even worse to imagine those people telling a columnist that you suck, worse still to see that written up in your local paper in a not-blind blind item that has enough clues to let you figure out who hates you while still protecting their public anonymity....

Just how much pig can one city eat? It’s not an unreasonable question to ask these days, when you can get belly in your ramen and headcheese in your ravioli and the hottest new restaurant in town is a shrine to pork, oysters and beer. The latest venture from the dream team of chef Paul Kahan, sommelier Eduard Seitan, and restaurateurs Donnie Madia and Terry Alexander (the first three are the brain trust driving Blackbird and Avec, the latter two the scenemakers behind Sonotheque and the Violet Hour), in development for more than two years, the Publican finally opened in October and the buzz has been deafening....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pegasus began as a touring troupe dedicated to performing original writings by students at the City Colleges of Chicago, including Truman Community College, where Crewdson taught drama. In 1979, the company moved into the 90-seat auditorium of the Edgewater Presbyterian Church (now home to City Lit Theater), and in 1984 relocated to Truman’s sprawling, 250-seat O’Rourke Performing Arts Center....

In summer 2009, I was walking through the woods in Indiana with my girlfriend and found some chanterelle mushrooms and roasted them on the side of the trail with some beef jerky. A couple days later we were like, “That was kind of fun, let’s go out and see if we can find more mushrooms.” After about a week or two it was like, “All right, I’m tired of eating mushrooms....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nobody will ever confuse Pit Er Pat with a reggae band (though they do toss in a fractured digital dancehall riddim on “Trod-a-Long”), but on High Time drummer Butchy Fuego and bassist Rob Doran have chilled way out, at least compared to the occasionally somewhat spastic, overbusy rhythms of the group’s earlier work. And primary vocalist Fay Davis-Jeffers spends more time weaving airy electric-guitar lines into the mix than she does hammering down her usual keyboard riffs–when she does play keys, as on “My Darkers,” it feels much calmer and more atmospheric....

Alain Resnais’ 2006 adaptation of a British play by Alan Ayckbourn is a world apart from his earlier Ayckbourn adaptation, Smoking/No Smoking (1993). That film tried to be as “English” as possible, but this time Resnais looks for precise French equivalents to British qualities, and what emerges is one of his most personal works, intermittently recalling the melancholy Muriel (1963) and Providence (1977). A bittersweet comedy of loneliness, shyness, and repression, it was shot entirely on cozy sets, with a continual snowfall outside, and its interwoven plots feature Resnais standbys Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi, Andre Dussollier, and Lambert Wilson....

It’s a Saturday night at the Wicker Park Urban Outfitters and the punky all-girl trio Gamine Thief is playing in the second-floor men’s footwear pagoda. Flams and feedback fill the store, and fans and supporters stand side by side with curious shoppers, potential purchases in hand. The spectacle, part of a benefit for the Girls Rock! Chicago summer camp, has lured in two plump-faced girls no older than ten who are cruising around on their own....

Last summer, temperatures were hardly hot enough to encourage lying around on the beach, let alone jumping in the water. But that’ll all be different this time around. Right? Herewith an optimistic list of things to do in, on, or near (yes, there is a remote control option) Chicago’s bodies of water. —Sam Worley Wateriders In addition to kayak rentals, Wateriders offers tours, including a Fireworks Paddle at Navy Pier and a Shady Chicago Tour, in search of the city’s “ghosts and gangsters....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you get off the main strip of SXSW happenings, there are scores of parties and house shows and in-stores and lots of unofficial and even impromptu weirdness. Actually, that’s usually the real action—not seeing mega-size bands in too-small venues (this weekend, for instance, Muse is booked at a club they could probably fill 20 times over). In the past few years the parties and daytime unofficial shows have actually become more of the thing that makes SXSW worth going to (especially given that seemingly 60 percent of the bands playing here play Chicago on their way to or from Austin)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For weeks my Michigan friends have been trying to make me believe the football gods will shine upon me this Saturday in the form of Northwestern routing the Wolverines in Ann Arbor. I officially maintained that the game would be close, even as I secretly—and giddily—imagined watching our guys run up and down the field in a three-touchdown win over an unusually bad MaizenBlue....