Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Populist Jerry Kleiner‘s long-awaited answer to the void in Hyde Park’s mid-range dining options is admirable—the crowd on my Saturday-night visit to this manifestation of his lurid red-velvet vision of urbanity was integrated to a degree I’m not sure exists anywhere else in town. But while the “classic American” dishes may seem attractive, larded with enough trendy ingredients and nods toward seasonality to set the casual diner’s mind at ease, in execution many of those I tasted were middling: crayfish ragout failed to ignite glazed salmon, overroasted roasted halibut filet fused prosaically with its pureed cauliflower, a Spanish chorizo stuffing emphasized the dryness of a roasted chicken....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bell led off and finished with Bach’s “Chaconne” from the Partita No. 2 in D Minor, “considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It’s exhaustingly long — 14 minutes — and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ted Kotcheff’s Australian cult classic Wake in Fright (1971) opens for a weeklong run at Gene Siskel Film Center, screening in a restored print from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. Adapted from a novel by Kenneth Cook, it’s the tale of a boozing Sydney schoolteacher who lands in an outback mining town and gets pulled into the local yahoo culture....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Sunday night at 7 PM at Heaven Gallery, Ulery is celebrating the release of his new album Themes and Scenes (Woolgathering). He won’t be performing live–the event is simply a listening party. Before I listened to the new album I was puzzled by this choice, since jazz is all about live performance. The pieces are by and large episodic, and they chart their own narratives....

Municipal Waste One of the reasons that I love thrash metal so much is that few musical styles can touch its singleminded focus on getting fucked up and fucking shit up. Thrash metal doesn’t want you to contemplate your place in the universe or really feel your feelings, it wants you to drink a rack of cheap beer and light off fireworks in your friend’s basement. It wants you to spray-paint stuff that’s not your property and then do skateboard tricks off it....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In December in Easton, Pennsylvania, 49-year-old Floyd Kinney Jr. pleaded guilty to molesting two girls; he blamed the attacks on his wife’s devotion to bingo, which he said kept her out of the house “three, four times a week.” (The judge pointed out that “some people, when their wives are not home, decide to do other things, like clean their living rooms....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s too easy to dismiss anything coming from a big business—let alone one that used to be owned by McDonald’s—as greenwashing. A couple of years ago at the Chicago Food Film Festival, Chipotle got jeers as a sponsor (despite, or maybe because of, this slick and quite moving visual representation of what their philosophy is). Food Revolution Chicago Megan Weinerman, new host of Food Revolution Chicago Seeking more info on Facebook, we find that the vision of food revolution in Chicago now includes posing with Billy Dec, which should really set Food Revolution Chicago apart from other local network food television....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few years back Reader food writer Mike Sula had little but praise for Matt Eversman, opening chef at the West Loop Vietnamese restaurant Saigon Sisters. Young and with not much more than culinary school, an externship at Charlie Trotter’s, and a line-cook gig under his belt, Eversman was nevertheless coming up with dishes “as audacious as grilled confit octopus clinging to a stretch of rice dyed black with cuttlefish ink” and an “utterly corrupting op la” with fried eggs, pork belly, Benton’s country ham, Chinese sausage, and a pork bun....

Hemant Mehta Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mehta was born a Jain, a largely Indian religion that’s not evangelical. Jains believe that the universe has always existed, as have all souls, and that reincarnations are largely based on karma accumulated in previous lives. Good karma comes from following the five vows of nonviolence, truth telling, “nonstealing,” chastity, and nonpossessiveness. Jains are vegetarians, and the most devout wear masks and sweep the street ahead of them as they walk so as not to injure any other life-form....

Out of Africa African Harambee7537 N. Clark | 773-764-2200 $Moroccan, Mediterranean | Dinner: seven days.Open late: Friday & Saturday till midnight | byo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t assume the big colorful balls of yam, cassava, and maize served at Bolat are just simple sides on a par with dinner rolls or mashed potatoes. Rather, amala (ground yam, purple and glutinous), fufu (beaten yam or cassava, white and firm), and kenkey (fermented maize) are integral to Ghanaian and Nigerian meals....

The railway station in Alois Nebel, which screens again tomorrow night. I could recommend the Czech feature Alois Nebel (screening again at the Siskel Film Center’s European Union Film Festival tomorrow at 8 PM) for its distinctive animation, which recalls early rotoscoping experiments as well as Bob Sabiston’s more recent work on Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. But I most enjoyed the film for its primary setting, a small railway station somewhere in the woods of the Czech Republic....

Jordan Z, La Radio, Brock, Ian Hixxx 11 PM, free with MCA First Fridays ticket Clubs that will hold all-ages shows are hard to come by. To sell alcohol at shows with underagers in attendance, a venue needs a “Consumption on Premises–Incidental Activity” license, which requires it to provide some attraction other than alcohol. (In Subterranean’s case this means the kitchen must be open.) And even for clubs that can secure the right license, all-ages shows may not be a viable proposition....

I’m multitasking as I sit here typing this review of Brendan Sodikoff’s Bavette’s Bar & Boeuf. To my left a half-dozen bulging takeaway containers from the previous night’s dinner at the River North “European steak house” are competing for my attention. The creamed spinach I was served, already fortified by blue cheese, has been given structure by a hardened overcoat of brown, blistered Chihuahua, and I’m stuffing it into my face cold with one hand as I struggle to communicate how powerless I am to stop eating it....

You might expect profound hearing loss to rule out a career in music, but it had the opposite effect on Stephen Gauci. At nine he discovered that while he couldn’t always make out what his friends were saying, he could hear the saxophone just fine and embarked upon years of intensive practice and study on the instrument. Now 40, he’s only recently started releasing albums under his own name, and his latest, Wisps of an Unknown Face (CIMP), is his first as leader of a quartet....

What a year 2013 was! School cuts and closings, broken promises, public offices treated like heirlooms, handouts to rich guys, a rubber-stamp City Council—and, amid it all, god-awful baseball on both sides of town. In other words, a typical year in Chicago. Runner-up: Mayor Emanuel, who was out of the country on another vacation when the Board of Education made about $256 million in additional budget cuts from regular public schools—while increasing funding for charter schools by $80 million....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week in Omnivorous I wrote about now-defunct Chicago cookbook publishers the Culinary Arts Institute and its director of 11 years, Ruth Berolzheimer. Flipping through its best-known title, the massive 1939 American Woman’s Cook Book, I struggled to pick out an appropriate recipe to put up on the blog. It was tempting to choose one of the curiosities–cottage cheese and peanut loaf anyone?...

Parking garages aren’t generally known as inspired architecture. The self-park at 60 E. Lake, visible from the train as the Loop tracks turn at Wabash, might stand out on this note alone: its gaudy, teal, art deco facade makes for the most eye-catching garage in downtown Chicago. But to the average rushed passerby, the structure probably just looks like another run-down self-park, albeit a brightly colored one. Designed by local architect Stanley Tigerman and built in 1986, the garage is made to look like the front end of a Rolls-Royce....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I came late to singer Nedelle Torrisi (who made a string of solo albums in the early aughts), falling for her lovely voice only in 2007 after she had formed Cryptacize with Chris Cohen. I remain a big fan of both of their albums, and was saddened when to learn that when they split as a couple, they also split as a band....

Todd Edwards There are something like a million afterparties happening over Pitchfork weekend. One of the best-looking ones is the Boiler Room party happening on Saturday. If you’re not already familiar, Boiler Room‘s whole thing is throwing parties at secret locations in cities around the globe headlined by the some of the biggest names in underground dance music and hip-hop, the ones who are at the very tipping point of mainstream popularity that have yet to make the final step over, and broadcasting them online, so you can watch people in Berlin dance along to someone’s neo-disco DJ set, or something along those lines....

Taina Rodriguez was at the dog beach with her husband and two mini schnauzers one afternoon last June when she got a disturbing phone call from her neighbor. There’s been an explosion in your apartment, the neighbor said. You should hurry home. Puchalski’s fix, according to Rodriguez, was to gas the place. “He came in and put propane tanks in our apartment,” she says. “He thought he could heat up the apartment and the bedbugs would die....