Oh, the Cupidity Mohammad Islam and Malika Ameen, the married couple in the kitchen at Aigre Doux, have celebrity chef pedigrees (the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Jean Georges, Balthazar, Craft), and the promise of their restaurant earned it blurbs in glossy magazines months before it opened. Given the boldface print, it’s gratifying and somewhat surprising to discover that the food isn’t crying for attention: it’s simple, elegant, and good, full stop....

Stefanie Wright The last one Around since 1904 and reopened on Taylor Street this spring, Scafuri Bakery exudes cozy. The walls, hung with family photos, are a warm shade of ochre. Midcentury-style chairs clustered around a faux-wood Formica table could transport you to a nonna’s kitchen. Visiting late one Sunday morning, we saw neighborhood ladies shopping, coffee drinkers in for a pick-me-up, a family making a pit stop for pizza, pans of focaccia-like Roman-style pies sold by the square ($3....

A beloved string quartet that’s been performing together for 25 years (Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mark Ivanir) begins to crumble after the cellist (Walken) is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. This lovely drama by screenwriters Seth Grossman and Yaron Zilberman is so attentive to the creative nuance and emotional dynamics of classical performance that I was almost disappointed when the story began to move into the various interpersonal conflicts between the players....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the top 67 earners on the city’s payroll this month, 12 have received promotions since last August. The other 55 didn’t–but 31 of them still received 3 percent raises, which worked out to between $4,320 and $5,160 each per year. Most are leaders of departments that made multiple layoffs. A few examples: NAME TITLE 2008 2009 DEPT STAFFING CHANGE...

Ken Davis, many years ago the program director of WBEZ, has decided to step up and try to save journalism in Chicago. He’s assembling an all-star roster of local talent and putting it on display February 22 in a three-hour forum devoted to the flatlining local news business. I’m glad Davis vented, and I hope that’s now out of his system. The Reader‘s original owners weren’t greedy, weren’t stupid, and didn’t build an empire too big not to collapse....

the hurt locker Directed by kathryn bigelow Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The movie was written by Mark Boal, an embedded journalist in Iraq whose nonfiction story in Playboy inspired Paul Haggis’s wrenching antiwar drama In the Valley of Elah (2007). That movie, in which a father confronts the brutal truth about his late son’s combat experience, stood head and shoulders above any other dramatic feature about Iraq when it was released....

Since social media’s such great entertainment already—admit it, that’s why you stay “friends” with people you secretly believe are psychotic sociopaths and would hide from in real life—it’s almost surprising that more professionals haven’t bothered to co-opt it into formal entertainment beyond fake Twitter feeds. Or maybe that is the problem: that social media’s such great entertainment already. Anyway, Isinglass, a Portland, Oregon-based theater company, has decided to take the plunge by bringing Shakespeare to social media, specifically Much Ado About Nothing....

thursday28 Thursday28 Geh20 Goth1k David Grubbs Friday29 Fielded Hunx & His Punx, Shannon & the Clams Mind Over Mirror Mogwai Saturday30 Battles Dead Milkmen Grails Florian Hecker Femi Kuti & the Positive Force Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers Wednesday4 An Horse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » FIELDED It’s hard not to fall for Fielded, the solo project from Ga’an vocalist Lindsay Powell. One listen to “White Death,” the title track of her new seven-inch on Sophomore Lounge Records, ought to be enough for anyone with a working prefrontal cortex and the capacity to feel....

I’m well aware that it’s declassé to publicly draw knives on management, and that a show of disloyalty can make it hard to find a new job when your ride’s here, and I’m sympathetic to people who err on the side of caution (on the side of being able to feed yourself, specifically). But the third factor in TribCo’s recent cutbacks, the truly epic amounts of debt Sam Zell took out on the backs of the employee “owners” – which Zell himself has admitted, if dickishly and halfheartedly, was a mistake – seems so obvious here as to not only warrant mentioning but to be entirely safe to do so....

Of the many disguises I wear to work, my favorite is the disoriented foreign tourist: I walk into a new restaurant clutching the Lonely Planet Chicago and in a vaguely eastern European accent ask if they serve “the deep dish.” Most hosts are sympathetic when telling me no, and I allow myself to be talked into a table or a seat at the bar to hear the highlights of the menu....

Thursday28 Black AngelsDawn of MidiFrankie Rose & the OutsPlanes Mistaken for StarsVaderVaselines Friday29 BooksShakira Saturday30 ChromeoDawn of Midi Sunday31 Joost Buis, Edoardo Marraffa, Alberto BraidaLil B the Based GodMisfitsMonarch Tuesday2 Wet Hair Wednesday3 European Jazz Meets Chicago DAWN OF MIDI Dawn of Midi didn’t record their remarkable debut, First (Accretions), until three years after they started playing together, and it shows. Indian bassist Aakaash Israni, Pakistani percussionist Qasim Naqvi, and Moroccan pianist Amino Belyamani were all students at CalArts when they formed the group in 2007, and they would meet in a windowless practice room late at night and play in pitch darkness—a habit that sharpened their ears and fostered their collective approach....

River North’s Gilt Bar is only the latest in a long line of new restaurants testing the limits of how much gastropubbery the market can bear. Nearly a year and a half after the Bristol and the Publican broke this ground, communal tables, shared plates, odd meats, and beer, beer, beer are everywhere, and if you haven’t had enough I have some marrow bones I can sell you at a 150 percent markup....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My wife and I spent Monday campaigning for Obama in Indianapolis, thinking that with Illinois a lock we should bring the sweet light of civilization to the Hoosiers. Like all Chicagoans we tend of think of Indiana as a rustic backwater, and nothing you see on brief encounter with Indy causes you to revise that opinion. The city covers an enormous geographical area, stemming from consolidation of the city with surrounding Marion county in 1970; sizable parts of the city are still rural, and the Obama field office we worked out of for part of the day was in an old farm house....

These Are Powers’s “Silver Lung,” the A side of their debut seven-inch, grabs you from the get-go with a completely diseased guitar riff–a pulsing, mechanical bleat that sounds like a meltdown alert at a nuclear reactor. Formed just this past September, the Brooklyn trio has attracted plenty of attention already, in part because bassist-vocalist Pat Noecker was in the Liars and guitarist-vocalist Anna Barie was in Knife Skills. Like Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, These Are Powers have a postapocalyptic sound that veers between dread and panic, and drummer Ted McGrath plays simple quasi-tribal beats on a kit with no hi-hat, a nod to the early minimalist style of Bob Bert and Ikue Mori....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s how John Drury, author of 1931’s Dining in Chicago: An Intimate Guide, conjured up an even more distant era of Bohemian-Czech gemütlichkeit by gaslight. (Thomas died in 1905, so it would have been before then.) Apparently even by 1931, with the Bohemian-born “Two Ton Tony” Cermak in firm control of the Cook County machinery, it was possible to feel that the old Czech Chicago had already begun to fade into the past, belonging to an era when you wiped your (entirely legal) Pilsner from your walrus mustache while a brass band oompah’d the “Merry Widow Waltz....

The teachers’ strike was barely over when a Tribune editorial hit the streets ripping unionized schools and lauding nonunion charters, starting with one run by UNO, a Mayor Emanuel favorite. “The good teachers know they’ll do fine. They’ve got the confidence. I’ve talked to them. I know,” Rauner said, according to a story by the Trib‘s Rick Pearson. “It’s the weak teachers. It’s the lousy, ineffective, lazy teachers that—unfortunately, there are a number of those—they’re the ones that the union is protecting....

At least once a week all summer long someone in the Baylor family drives down south and hauls back a 48-foot semitrailer filled—front to back, top to bottom—with sweet, crisp, 90-percent-water-based nostalgia. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many of the customers are of Homer and Mack’s generation, and were raised, as the brothers were, in the south. Maybe their own parents grew and sold watermelons....

In his 1985 play Sam Shepard returned to a once-rich source–the disillusioned, dysfunctional nuclear family splattered like roadkill on the highways of the American west–and came up with an underdeveloped mix of melodrama, sitcom, and traumedy. His unwieldy tale of two doomed families linked by a young married couple who can’t differentiate between violence and love invites indulgent acting, but for the most part director Nic Dimond skillfully reins in his admirable cast....

Besides my distaste for critics who anoint an “album of the year” while there’s still snow on the ground, there’s really just one reason I’ve been ignoring the media deluge surrounding the Arcade Fire’s second album, Neon Bible. (It came out March 6 on Merge, but by then advance copies had been provoking hyperbole for months.) It’s because I fell in love with the band after their debut, Funeral, and I didn’t want to get sick of hearing about them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That momentum continued to this year’s Hoptacular, held in the Lacuna Artist Loft Studios in Pilsen and, for the first time, featuring live entertainment (including live music and a “Beer Hop Derby”). Like last year, there were around 60 breweries, but more of them were local—a function, no doubt, of the fact that the number of breweries in Chicago has exploded in the past year or two....