brazilianbowl.com Lakeview’s Brazilian Bowl It may be carnival time in Brazil, but freezing rain doesn’t exactly put me in the mood for samba dancing. I could sure go for some feijoada (pronounced “FEY-zhu-ah-da”), though. Often called the national dish of Brazil, it’s a thick, incredibly warming black bean stew traditionally made with all sorts of beef and pork—tongue, pig’s feet, sausage, etc—though it seems there are as many variations as there are cooks....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nicodemus’s greatest hour at the Sun-Times may have been neither a story he wrote nor a contract he negotiated but an exodus he refused to join. In early 1984 Rupert Murdoch took over the paper, and the top editors and writers headed for the hills. Nicodemus stayed. He later told me: “To have the Tribune as the only major journalistic print voice in town would be a disaster, and therefore preserving and fighting for the quality and the existence of the Sun-Times is a moral necessity from my point of view....

Aigre Doux230 W. Kinzie | 312-329-9400 $$$$South American, Italian | Dinner: Sunday, Tuesday-Saturday | Sunday brunch | Closed Monday | Open late: Thursday-Saturday till 11 The Bluebird1749 N. Damen | 773-486-2473 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » $American, Ice Cream | Breakfast: Sunday, Tuesday-Saturday; Lunch: seven days; Dinner: Tuesday-Friday | Reservations not accepted | Cash only | BYO It’s a long way from Malaika Marion’s first Chicago job at Planet Hollywood to her “soup, sandwich, and shake shack” on the western fringe of Logan Square....

The 13th European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 12, through Thursday, April 1, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $10, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 18; for a full festival schedule see siskelfilmcenter.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » R Bluebeard Like Eric Rohmer near the end of his career, French director Catherine Breillat has begun to experiment with costume drama as a way of recasting her signature themes, and she’s found a perfect property in Charles Perrault’s tale of a fearsome nobleman who murders his wives....

Aimee Levitt In order for a bagel to be truly a bagel, as opposed to a round dinner roll with a hole in the middle, it needs to be boiled before it’s baked. When you do this, the bagel develops a tough, shiny crust that contrasts pleasingly with the soft, bready interior. (Allegedly they were teething rings for Jewish children back in the Old Country.) This is what a bagel should taste like....

Why did banks settle on that very 70s futuristic—and downright awful-looking—font as the standard typeface for the routing and account numbers on checks? Is there something inherently superior about it? If so, why isn’t it found on more official documents? —B. Yankee, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What you’re asking about is the font used for magnetic-ink character recognition, better known as the MICR (pronounced “MY-ker”) font....

It took two decades for reedist Jeff Newell to finally release an album by New-Trad Octet, the inventive band he assembled to revisit trad-jazz classics and recast mainstream jazz tunes with a New Orleans marching band sensibility. But anyone expecting to hear the group tackle Armstrong, Ellington, Mingus, and Parker on the just-released Brownstone (Blujazz) is in for a surprise–Newell and his merry misfits don’t cover any jazz at all. They adhere to the New Orleans sound, but the material is much older: three Sousa marches and a six-part suite called Hymn Pan Alley, the movements of which are based on melodies by little-known early-20th-century composers from Newell’s adopted neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn....

A Montreal woman (Mary Margaret O’Hara) journeys to Vienna to watch over a comatose cousin and, left to her own devices in a foreign city, strikes up a friendship with an elderly guard (Bobby Sommer) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Their friendship plays out largely in the museum galleries, against canvases by Rembrandt and Bruegel, and a lengthy monologue about the latter, delivered by a docent at the movie’s midpoint, underlines how deeply writer-director Jem Cohen (Benjamin Smoke) has internalized Breugel’s fascination with seemingly trivial but sharply idiosyncratic characters....

If you know about Nate Kinsella, it’s probably because of his astounding contributions to local post-posthardcore band Make Believe, which started in 2003 as a touring version of Joan of Arc (led by his cousin Tim Kinsella) and went on hiatus in 2008. Not only did he drive the music with his complex, propulsive drumming, he also added electric piano, using his right hand on a keyboard set up across his kick drum while he played his kit....

Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944) was a New York society lady and amateur opera singer who compared herself to divas like Frieda Hempel and Luisa Tetrazzini but sounded like a slide whistle in terrible pain. Known as the “Terror of the High Cs,” she lacked rhythm, pitch, tone, talent, and, crucially, self-awareness. What she had instead were sincerity, ego, some artistic feeling, and a bunch of money. Naturally she was an enormous success....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’ve seen Andrew Garfield in the British dramas Boy A or Red Riding: 1974, you know he’s a moodier, more turbulent presence than gee-whiz Tobey Maguire, who starred in the first three Spider-Man blockbusters. This fourth installment is a complete reboot, returning to the web-slinger’s creation story, and Garfield, more than any other factor, contributes to the sense of a bleaker vision along the lines of The Dark Knight....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the musical debuted in 1940, it broke new ground–and stirred controversy–with its cynical tone and seamy story, about a sexy young nightclub dancer who’s kept by a middle-aged, married Chicago society dame. The jazzy songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart have long since proved their staying power–especially “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” a wry ballad the society dame, Vera, sings about her boy toy (“I’ll sing to him/Each spring to him/And worship the trousers that cling to him/Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I”)....

Q I’m a 32-year-old, very attractive, very fit SWM living in NYC. I’m well read and well spoken. I march to the beat of my own drum. Friends tell me that my personality is intense. It must be true—everyone concurs. I’m extremely idealistic, and I count myself as a romantic. I’m interested in an intense and consuming love affair with a woman. But friends tell me that my approach to courtship and my energy scare women off....

You know what is just as exciting as watching paint dry? Watching people lose weight. Seriously, it is one of the most boring, most mind numbingly uninteresting things ever but 18.9 million people will tune into watch it. 3-4 million more would rather watch D-List (at best) celebrities learn how to dance which is pretty much the same as watching people who look like your neighbors try and fit into an old pair of jeans....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Richard Rayner has a short piece in this week’s New Yorker that offers a fascinating glimpse of the extent of China’s Olympic efforts. A few years back, Beijing’s deciduous trees were hit by a blight that left them bare of leaves, and concerned about the impression this would make, Chinese officials enlisted the help of Finnish entomologist Kari Heliövaara....

friday2 BEN ALLISON quartet See Friday. a 8 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, 773-878-5552, $12. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » cholmes brothers The Holmes Brothers kick off their latest, State of Grace (Alligator), with a slyly camouflaged nod to their roots. “Smiling Face Hiding a Weeping Heart,” despite its rock-tinged arrangement, invokes Al Green: the meandering melody, the deceptively boxy funk cadence, the smoldering tension between carnal and spiritual....

This piece was produced by the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica, in partnership with Marketplace. Reporter Michael Grabell followed buses and vans from the early-morning pickups in Chicago to the warehouses in the far suburbs, and conducted more than 60 interviews with workers, raiteros, temp agency recruiters, managers of check-cashing stores, and others. The ProPublica team examined check stubs, court records, labor department files, and undercover video shot by the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative, an advocacy group that opposes some temp agency practices....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meanwhile, for tonight’s whisky-free entertainment, San Francisco Chronicle food writer Linda Furiya reads from her food memoir Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America, about growing up in Versailles, Indiana, as part of the only Japanese family in town. It’s tonight at 7:30 at Women & Children First. Saturday morning at 9 the Culinary Historians of Chicago present Anne Willan on “An Exploration of the Best and Worst of Historical Recipes,” at Robert Morris College Institute of Culinary Arts, 401 S....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Memphis is one those American cities where music seems to ooze from it very pores. As in New Orleans or Austin, it’s part of everyday life, and because of that, diverse styles coexist and collide, and musicians retain a respect for music history that’s often shunned in this land of short attention spans. I first heard the music of John Paul Keith a few years ago when he released his second album, The Man That Time Forgot (Big Legal Mess), and I was instantly taken by its familiarity....

I’m a sucker for any collection of songs billed as a “concept,” and local singer-songwriter Owen Ashworth hooked me onto the latest EP from his Advance Base project even before I heard a note of it. It’s called The World Is in a Bad Fix Everywhere, and the premise behind it is pretty simple—it’s a cover EP of songs by Washington Phillips, an enigmatic Texas preacher who recorded 18 lo-fi gospel songs before passing away in the 1950s....