Mike Sula In lieu of poorly lit spaetzle, please accept this poorly lit stained glass With the ongoing blitzkrieg of neu-Germanic food this year, I wonder if the Berghoff family regrets shutting down its touristy historic namesake restaurant back in 2006. They could always resurrect it, I suppose, but that would be difficult, given most of its interior has been scattered to the winds. Some tables and chairs, for instance, have found their way into Old Town’s Glunz Tavern, which reopened in December just in time to ride the lightning after a hiatus of 80-some years....

The Japanese concept of omakase—essentially putting the progression and content of your meal completely under the creative control of the chef—certainly isn’t foreign to Chicago. But there is a relative dearth of ultra-high-end Japanese fine dining on which to blow whole paychecks for a few captive hours. That shortage is not only relative to Tokyo, but also to Los Angeles and New York, which both have higher populations of Japanese expats and therefore are able to support exorbitantly priced prix fixe Japanese restaurants such as Urusawa and Masa, respectively....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak was in town last weekend to tape 15 family-, college-, and sports-themed episodes that will begin airing April 28. Sajak was born in Chicago and grew up around 31st Street and Kedzie. He attended Goethe and Gary elementary schools, graduated from Farragut High School, and went to Columbia College (while working nights as a desk clerk at the Palmer House Hotel), leaving early to enlist in the army in 1968....

The first act of Edward Albee’s dark drama reveals a bracing eagerness not to please: Jo is dying, and we taste her angry envy of the abstractly mortal. No one not dying can understand the one who is. But the second act pushes Jo’s story into the wings. When the title character, a kind of angel of death, arrives with her bodyguard, only Sam, Jo’s faithful husband, realizes the lady is not Jo’s “mother....

the social network Directed by david fincher Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Zuckerberg has been showing his face more often in the last few months, mounting what’s been widely perceived as a preemptive strike. In July he granted a rare TV interview to Diane Sawyer for ABC’s World News, and in September he was the subject of a relatively flattering profile in the New Yorker....

At the end of December I noticed an uptick in online chatter—especially in niche networks within Twitter and Tumblr where up-to-the-second knowledge of micro­trends in dance-­music culture is generally assumed—regarding something called “seapunk.” The term refers in part to a style of electronic music that incorporates bits of 90s house and techno, the past 15 years or so of pop and R&B, and the latest in southern trap rap—all overlaid with a twinkly, narcotic energy that recalls new-age music and chopped-and-screwed hip-hop mix tapes in roughly equal measure....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whenever I watch Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro—which I finally saw on 35-millimeter at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week—I’m astonished by how vividly the film conjures memories of early childhood that I seldom recall on my own. The memories start materializing in the first few minutes, as the young heroines are exploring their new home. Miyazaki and his animators devote such nuance to plants, shadows, and planks of wood—things I’d probably take for granted today, if I encountered them in real life—that I feel as though I’m sharing in the girls’ discovery....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s more, Peirce’s take on the climactic prom massacre, which finds the unfairly terrorized Carrie reaching her wits’ end and murdering her classmates, has an uncomfortably contradictory air given the film’s call for more empathy and less cruelty. Most likely, her hand was forced by the studio powers that be. I wish it weren’t so. It’s disheartening to think that a director as talented as Peirce would have to essentially smuggle these themes into her own film, so here’s hoping she earned enough dough to help fund a more personal project....

At this year’s non-Equity Jeff Awards ceremony, held June 3 at Park West, Richard Cotovsky received special recognition for his “cutting edge contributions to Non-Equity Theatre over the past four decades.” He’s spent most of that time as the artistic director of Mary-Arrchie Theatre, acting in and directing productions built according to the classic off-Loop blueprint: gritty, gutsy plays performed by actors with day jobs (Cotovsky is a full-time pharmacist) on a stage not much bigger than a parking space, for an audience that doesn’t far outnumber the cast....

“My backstory—I was a box,” says the gravel-voiced host of Blind Summit’s The Table. And yes, there’s the telltale look of brown corrugated to his big, multiplaned head, though the rest of him appears to be made of cotton-stuffed cloth. Standing about two feet tall and operated by three London-based puppeteers, he’s supposed to be performing a piece about the final hours of Moses on Mount Nebo. He’s a garrulous sort, though, and so we get vast digressions, voiced by Blind Summit cofounder Mark Down: A disquisition, for instance, on the merits of the table that defines his world....

Logan Square’s Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival is billed as the “most diverse & vibrant” of Chicago’s art fests. A pet project of 35th Ward alderman Rey Colón, it’ll run July 23-25 this year and cover a 1.5-mile stretch of Milwaukee from Kimball to California, turning more than 20 empty storefronts into ad hoc galleries showcasing the work of about 200 visual artists. Three official stages will offer live music, with a free trolley cruising from one end of the strip to the other....

A typical dialogue scene in Bonjour Tristesse Regardless of their overall merit, the recent Northwest Chicago Film Society selections Sometimes a Great Notion, Bonjour Tristesse, and The Vikings (the last of which screens this Wednesday at the Patio Theater) are all stunning examples of wide-screen cinematography. It’s not just that the films use wide-screen to emphasize the epic grandeur of their locations; it’s that they employ it as an effect that constantly shapes our view of the action, much like other films employ 3-D....

Of all the wacky responses I got from the announcement of Punk Planet’s closure (“Have you considered going online?” “Why don’t you just move to Canada?” and “Why didn’t you warn me?!”) by far the most prescient was this one: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All the hubbub about this being a revival of the question of “selling out,” though, misses the point. In the early 1990s, when bands jumped from an independent label to a major label, they did so for direct and indirect financial gain....

The Mad Decent-based spin-off Jeffree’s is an interesting experiment in how to sell music to an audience that’s used to getting it for free. As I outlined in a column last year on the legal issues that can arise when you release free sample-based music, the label’s unique business plan consists of finding unknown artists and hosting their best material on a curated SoundCloud account, and occasionally releasing anthologies of recent highlights at a higher sound quality through digital retailers like iTunes....

Neil Gaiman, who edited the 2010 installment of The Best American Comics, occupies a prominent but strange place in the history of the form. His Sandman series (1989-1996) was hugely popular and critically acclaimed. Although set in the traditional DC Comics universe—with walk-on parts for everyone from Hellblazer’s John Constantine and members of the Justice Society to obscure villains like Dr. Destiny—the book was original in tone and appeal. In place of steroidal underwear fetishists done up in primary colors Sandman offered pale, thin Dream, who wore somber contemporary or period garb and angsted rather than fought his way through unhurried, character-driven fantasy narratives, strewing portentous bons mots in his wake....

The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of King Edward II, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer Chicago Shakespeare Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To create his thrill ride, Graney alters the text’s fundamental dynamics. Marlowe’s script tells the parallel stories of King Edward II, who reigned from 1307 to 1327, and Roger Mortimer, Earl of March—a pair of men with diametrically opposed relationships to power....

By Michael Miner But almost to his own embarrassment, Muwakkil has concluded there is no road: Washington just happened, and years later Obama just happened. “I had initially subscribed to the notion that the people produce the leadership,” he wrote in the March 18 ITT, “but my look back at the Washington years forced a change in my thinking. Washington’s success was largely a product of his personal dynamism and unique political virtuosity....

Chicago multi-instrumentalist and producer Jonn Wallen, who records and performs as Oui Ennui, has been writing music since he was five. Working mostly with synths and computers, he makes maximalist compositions he describes as “paintings.” In September 2019, he gave his first public performance in more than a decade as part of the Plantasia event at the Garfield Park Conservatory, and he was looking forward to more. Instead the pandemic hit....

RADIUSEtc . . .(Gritty Goat) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Raised in Gary, Indiana, but currently working out of LA, Freddie Gibbs got a huge boost when the New Yorker‘s Sasha Frere-Jones called him “the one rapper I would put money on right now” in an October 26 essay on the state of hip-hop. Yesterday he was just another MC dropped from a major label without a release—he’d recorded plenty of material but lost his deal after the guy who signed him left the company—and now he’s being touted as the future of rap music....

“Does anyone have a nutmeg grater?” “Does anyone have a lighter?” Nine bartenders are rushing around the Fifty/50, a three-story bar/lounge/restaurant in Ukrainian Village, gathering ingredients and tools. They’re shaking, straining, and muddling, making foams and garnishes, and occasionally setting things on fire. Their creations are gradually lining up on the bar, but there are no customers around to consume them. The place isn’t even open. The bartenders have assembled for a mixology lab, the latest project from the Boozehound, a company Kyle McHugh started last fall to “help people drink better things better....