Usually when Tony Hu opens a restaurant it’s an occasion to celebrate. Either the esteemed Mayor of Chinatown introduces a heretofore novel regional cuisine such as Shanghainese, Hunnanese or Beijingese, or takes old favorites and pushes them further, or expands the influence of his flagship Lao Sze Chuan by establishing bases in underserved neighborhoods. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is completely new territory for Hu, evident by taking a quick glance around the large (often underpopulated) dining room at any given time and noting the great majority of non-Chinese diners, a demographic atypical of any of his ten other restaurants....

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party starts with a crisp old English gent taking a seat at the dining room table in his house by the sea. He’s been perusing the morning paper for a minute or two when a voice from offstage asks, “Is that you, Petey?” The gent doesn’t react. “Petey, is that you?” Still no response. “Petey?” “What?” he finally says. “Is that you?” “Yes, it’s me.” Early critics tagged this narrative vertigo the “comedy of menace,” and productions of The Birthday Party have tended to locate that menace in Goldberg and McCann, who are typically depicted as a couple of genial gentleman thugs—pros in sharkskin suits, sent by who knows who to punish Stanley for who knows what....

Featuring two stages of music and a purported 65,000 pounds of ribs and barbecue, the 12th annual Ribfest Chicago runs Fri-Sun 6/11-6/13, on Lincoln between Irving Park and Warner. For the first time you can not only enjoy some ribs yourself but also watch professional competitive eaters tear into them—on Friday at 6 PM the festival is hosting its inaugural RibMania, with 12 contestants vying for more than $2,000 in prize money....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I must admit I didn’t quite get the Clover at first. At home I brew at near toxic strength, so the lighter-bodied stuff that comes from it seemed insipid. But after a half dozen or so cups it really grew on me–the individual top flavors and nuances are really enhanced by the process (for more on the wonders of this machine see Louisa Chu’s Chow report)....

But open them at your own risk. A journey into the heart of Illinois’s bureaucratic darkness: the state capital With youth sports leagues and summer jobs programs, Englewood community groups will try to keep kids occupied and out of harm’s way. 110 summery things to do, every day from now until Labor Day 2013 Summer Guide: camp in the hills, ride the Bluegrass Parkway, and Shakespeare in the park Summer Guide: 110 things to do this summer...

So it died in 2003, and when it was resurrected without any community involvement in October of 2006 no one had a clue at first. I was really taken aback—I only saw it because we saw the agenda on a Tuesday for a Park District meeting on Wednesday. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It resulted in a new group being formed to litigate, and they got a judge who saw this as a public land deal that was bad for the public....

friday20 Mono is touring with sound artist Katsuhiko Maeda, who goes by the name WORLD’S END GIRLFRIEND (or World’s End Boyfriend, or Wonderland Falling Yesterday). His brand-new Hurtbreak Wonderland (Noble) is quixotic and mysterious, following its own labyrinthine logic through manipulated field recordings, walls of distortion, and eerie desertlike stretches of electronic minimalism. On Palmless Prayer/Mass Murder Refrain, Maeda’s 2005 collaboration with Mono, the band’s emo-leaning instrumental drama combines with the chill of his weird-science ways to create a haunting tension....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s issue Ben Sachs and I name our ten favorite movies to premiere in Chicago in 2013. We’ve got recommended reviews for The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese’s tale of excess in the 90s financial markets, and Blast of Silence, Allen Baron’s 1961 noir gem about a cheap hood trying to kill a mob boss. And check out our new reviews of Cold Turkey, starring Peter Bogdanovich as the morose father of a fractious Pasadena clan; Grudge Match, with Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone as aging palookas who meet again the ring; Her, Spike Jonze’s much-praised drama about a lonely bachelor in the near future who falls in love with his artificially intelligent computer operating system; Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, a biopic starring Idris Elba as the antiapartheid leader; The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Ben Stiller’s jacked-up adaptation of the old James Thurber story; and Stranger Things, a British debut feature about a college student who strikes up a friendship with a homeless drifter....

1836 Lake House Hotel opens on Kinzie Street, on the present site of the Wrigley Building. Its dining room is Chicago’s first fancy restaurant. 1858 First lunch counter opens at the Rock Island Railroad Station. Christmas Day, 1865 Union Stock Yard opens at Exchange and Halsted. (It closes on August 1, 1971.) 1880 H.H. Kohlsaat’s dairy lunch room opens, first of the great “cheap eats” restaurants. Eventually there will be so many around Madison and Clark that the area becomes known as Toothpick Alley....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Revisiting David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) on 35-millimeter the other day significantly deepened my admiration for the movie. Like all of Fincher’s work, Zodiac is full of digital effects—and it’s all the more remarkable for appearing to contain none. The movie exactingly re-creates the look of downbeat American crime movies from the late 60s through the late 70s, evoking at various points The Boston Strangler, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Don Siegel’s movies from Dirty Harry on, and the original The Taking of Pelham 123....

“I’m running for Cook County assessor,” Andrea Raila tells passersby—most of them rushing for the train—at the Davis Street el stop in Evanston on a sunny Tuesday morning. “This is a chance for some reform.” This is a race that in an ideal world would be determined by a healthy debate on our head-spinning property tax system. But in the early going it’s been dominated by raw, unadulterated Chicago politics....

There aren’t many Brazilian musicians who’ve been as consistently interesting and rewarding in the present century as Lucas Santtana. Since releasing his debut album, Eletro Ben Dodô (Natasha), in 2000, he’s continually challenged himself as a songwriter and producer, whether exploring dub or working with stripped-down performances that use an acoustic guitar to make every sound, including beats. On his new album, The God Who Devastates Also Cures (Mais Um Discos), he shifts gears yet again, crafting a sophisticated collection of electronics-tweaked pop, all of it steeped in the indelible sound of his homeland....

The most intellectually heroic of Jean-Luc Godard’s early features (1966) was inspired by his reading an article about suburban housewives day-tripping into Paris to turn tricks for spending money. Marina Vlady plays one such woman, followed over a single day in a slender narrative with many documentary and documentarylike digressions. But the central figure is Godard himself, who whispers his poetic and provocative ruminations over monumentally composed color ‘Scope images and, like James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, continually interrogates his own methods and responses....

The Chef: Abraham Conlon (Fat Rice)The Challenger: Jake Bickelhaupt (Sous Rising)The Ingredient: Pig uterus Conlon points out that many textures considered weird in this country are much appreciated elsewhere. In other countries, he says, “There’s more focus on use of the entire animal and the different textures that animal provides.” In southeast Asia in particular, taste has as much to do with aroma and texture as it does with flavor....

The love affair between hip-hop and dance music has been going on for a very long time but recently it’s been rekindled in a big way, and a lot of the credit for this goes to Alain “A-Trak” Macklovich. After earning his credentials in the rap world by winning the prestigious DMC DJ tournament and spending time manning the decks for Kanye, Macklovich fell hard into the resurgent rave scene, and much of his work since then—as a DJ, producer, and co-owner of the well-regarded Fool’s Gold record label—has been directed at hybridizing the two....

It hasn’t been a quiet season for Italian food, but there was one low-key opening that didn’t have every prosecco-soaked food writer in town scampering after a celebrity chef. Azzurra EnoTavola is Marty Fosse’s fourth extant restaurant, and the first of those to open outside his Andersonville stronghold, anchored by pan-Italian Anteprima. If Fosse—a front-of-the-house veteran of Spiaggia—is harboring dreams of an empire, he need only rebrand his likable flagship and sail it out to neighborhoods all over the city....

Kith & Kin 1119 W. Webster 773-472-7070 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The principals behind Kith & Kin could’ve hyped their inviting new spot as a gastropub and earned an oxygen-depleting collective yawn. But they didn’t, and a stealthy early-December opening attracted mobs to this otherwise culinarily bereft pocket of Lincoln Park. And they haven’t let up yet. Many others have gone this route in recent months—Longman & Eagle, the Fountainhead, Gilt Bar, to name a few—but none have done it with such casual, unpretentious consistency, from the $5 spreadable “crocks” with crostini to early-summer menu highlights like buttermilk-fried chicken thighs with green garlic-morel potato salad, tagliatelle with radish sprouts in English pea broth, and mammoth shareable whole roasted sea bass and grilled ribeye....

Carnegie Sargent’s Pharmacy & Health Center 845 N. Michigan 312-280-1220 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Any pharmacist can fill a bottle of pills. But third-generation pharmacist Mark Paley, director of Carnegie Sargent’s Pharmacy & Health Center, dispenses TLC. We know from personal experience that if you are a stranger in Chicago, far from home, and something has gone horribly wrong with your teeth, Paley will not merely fill the prescription the periodontist you found in the phone book wrote you....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are plenty of other shows going down through the weekend. Tonight Palmer Squares and Martin Sky swing by Tonic Room; tomorrow night Jump Up honcho Chuck Wren celebrates the 20th anniversary of his label’s first release, American Ska-thic, at Metro (read more about it in this week’s Gossip Wolf); on Saturday Rockie Fresh and Casey Veggies play Lincoln Hall; and on Sunday Evanston-reared folkie Ezra Furman performs at SPACE....

City officials and the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid committee are ramping up their campaign. Just a little over a year from now the International Olympic Committee will convene in Copenhagen to decide on the host city, and between now and then Chicago has to convince the world that it not only has the money and infrastructure to host the games but that its citizenry supports the effort. In 2004, when Frayne was a thermal engineering manager in California’s Silicon Valley, he explains, he watched controversy unfold over New York City’s ultimately unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, as residents voiced concern over the potential for overzealous use of eminent domain, displacement, and diversion of funds from more urgent city improvement projects....