[Update: In spring 2012 executive chef Todd Stein left the Florentine for Piccolo Due; in his place is Coco Pazzo vet Chris Macchia.] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not so for executive chef Todd Stein, who can often be seen purposefully striding across the dining room on critical tasks. Last summer the MK vet stepped away from an all-too-brief tenure at Cibo Matto—another corporate-owned hotel restaurant—and moved over to this, the first Chicago outpost of BLT Restaurants, a steak-centric New York group once fronted by Laurent Tourondel....

QI’m a 27-year-old man in a two-year relationship with a 26-year-old woman. My last partner cheated and lied and did some unforgivable things. I wasn’t blameless—I stayed with her long after I realized it wasn’t working—but our relationship did unearth a kink. After I found out about her cheating, I got extremely turned on thinking about it. I never told her. First things first: Polyamorous relationships and open relationships are two different things....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the sports junkie circles I travel in, I don’t know anyone who’s read this, or at least no one who hasn’t read it at my insistence. Smith is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, generally considered to be the living master at sports-oriented literary nonfiction (you may know him from his recent piece on Pat Tillman), and the best thing about the magazine....

Drunkard isn’t mawkish. It isn’t false. It doesn’t try to charm its readers into forgiving the author’s flaws. Neil Steinberg expects us to like him no more than he likes himself, and based on the evidence of this book, that relationship blows hot and cold. Drunkard reminds me of something I once told an adolescent daughter: that growing up is learning how to pretend to be normal. Entering middle age, Steinberg’s still pretending, and he can be luminous and touching when he considers his techniques....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Acts of God and the economy have lots to do with it—budget department spokeswoman Wendy Abrams says she can’t provide specific figures because they’re so fluid, but the unusually long, messy winter cost the city far more than it had expected, as have rising fuel costs. And the rotten economy—especially in the foundering construction and real estate sectors—has slowed the rate of money coming in....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By this point, you’ve probably read your fill about Lee Daniels’s The Butler (or, as the studio wants us to call it, Lee Daniels’ The Butler), the star-studded historical pageant that’s currently this country’s number-one box office attraction. But I think the movie is a lot stranger—and a lot angrier—than many reviews are making it out to be; in this week’s long review, I expound on this argument and offer thoughts on Daniels’s unique body of work....

Steven Conrad spent most of the past nine months in LA and New York editing and mixing sound for his directorial debut, a locally produced comedy called The Promotion, but he can’t stop obsessing. “I thought of something this morning that I want to shoot,” he says. “John C. Reilly’s character putting out a storage room fire with his bare hands. I really want to see John put out a fire....

It looks as though the maestro of Springfield—house speaker and Illinois Democratic party chair Michael Madigan—may be up to his old tricks again, using roll call votes on past legislation to hammer at Republican legislators fighting for reelection on November 4. Look, I know we should never put too much stock in anything one politician says about another during a campaign. As one north-side Democrat has so eloquently put it, “This isn’t a fucking bake sale; it’s the art of war....

There was a beard on the loose. It was a tricky beard. We only saw it at night. One guy saw it on the street. Somebody else saw it smiling in the corner. Everybody tried to catch it, but nobody could. It was one weird beard. I didn’t tell anyone. But then everyone started talking about how they saw a strange beard flying around town, and I thought, hey—I know that beard....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Chicago schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, addressing the Chicago Urban League in November. “We need to acknowledge that the community simply does not trust what we say or what we do,” Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said in November. This was during a speech to the Chicago Urban League, three weeks after Rahm Emanuel named her to replace Jean-Claude Brizard. The new CEO attributed the community’s lack of trust to “past actions” by CPS....

Given economic reality, leading a big band has to rank as one of the least prudent business choices a musician can make. Aside from the logistical nightmare of corralling a dozen or more musicians to rehearse and perform, it’s hard to even keep them onboard—musicians need to eat, so they go where they can make some money. There are a handful of successful jazz orchestras today—including those fronted by Maria Scheider and John Hollenbeck—but one of the most exciting is led by Brooklyn-based Darcy James Argue, a remarkably resourceful fellow leading a creative and well-rehearsed 18-piece group with boldly individualistic players like reedists Sam Sadigursky, John Ellis, and Josh Sinton; trumpeters Seneca Black and Ingrid Jensen; and trombonist Ryan Keberle, among others....

Food for Animals doesn’t much care for conventional hip-hop. Producer Ricky Rabbit (Nick Rivetti) carves out beats from glitchy noise and crackling feedback—most often placing the group well outside the category of Best Buy-appropriate hip-hop and much more into an experimental, what-the-hell-is-happening noise territory of your local in-the-know record store. But what keeps the tracks moving forward for the D.C. posse is the work of MCs Vulture Voltaire (Andrew Field-Pickering) and HY (Sterling Warren), who find the rhythm within an unrhythmic structure....

Sharon Van Etten’s earliest music was undeniably restrained. Armed with only her haunting voice and an acoustic guitar, she debuted with songs about a cruel breakup. When she made her first appearance in Chicago in September 2009 at the Empty Bottle as part of the Wire magazine’s Adventures in Modern Music festival, supporting her debut, Because I Was in Love (Language of Stone), her music was gentle and reserved, but there was nothing tentative about her talent and emotional intensity....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The nip in the air only reaffirms the fact that summer festival season is behind us, and for that I think we can thankful: no more porta-potties, shitty sound, traipsing through mud, and idiots wearing bandana headbands. Yes, amateur season is over, and hard-core music fans can hear live music the way it was meant to experienced—indoors! When students head back to school, bands hit the road in earnest, and this week’s offerings make that plain....

Argentinum Astrum,Malleus Maleficarum (Anti-Corp/Forcefield/Inherent) Knoxville, Tennessee, may not have the flashy musical legacy of its boot-scootin’ cousin, but it does have Argentinum Astrum. Four years after its most recent demo, this Marble City metal band has finally surfaced with a new album, a three-song opus whose charred black melodies, pulverizing doom, and hellish throat-scraping invocations oscillate between nightmarish and engrossing. The first track is a pained, droning slog through enemy territory, but a newfound reliance on black-metal tropes (and a surprisingly European sensibility) serves the band well throughout the second and third legs of the journey....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Former Daley speechwriter Dan Conley, last seen writing a totally berserk defense of Chicago politics in support of Barack Obama, actually turns on Obama w/r/t the candidate’s post-bipartisan-whatever foreign policy and his incoherence on the developing Georgia-Russian conflict. It’s interesting (via Digby). I’ve been playing catch-up on informing myself about what the hell’s going on there, but the CSM, Obsidian Wings, the WaPo, the NYT, and Lawyers, Guns, and Money are good places to start....

Gossip Wolf has mentioned Pilsen darkwave band Population before, and for good reason—their excellent gloomy tunes usually come in equally compelling packages. Their first demo tape came in a hand-printed sleeve sealed with red candle wax, and the two-song cassette they made for a January west-coast tour is bound in twine. Their brand-new 45, due from Chicago garage-rock tastemakers HoZac later this month, is just on yellow wax, but the sample track online, “White Crosses,” shows our black-clad friends in fine, ferocious form....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Everybody else” may be a majority of two — Tribune Company COO Randy Michaels and innovation chief Lee Abrams. From what I hear, no mere editors are involved in the project to lure Mariotti into the Tower. Michaels and Abrams, with no prior newspaper experience between them, are Sam Zell’s guys, and I’m sure these two men of the world will have no trouble shrugging off Mariotti’s history of surly Zell-bashing back when Mariotti did his writing for the Sun-Times....

Julie Meckler Amanda Scotese On a recent afternoon, tour guide Amanda Scotese led an ambling group of nine sightseers past the Cook County Vital Records Office beneath the Daley Center. Most of them had never been in the pedway before. As the tourists took in their first views of the underground pathway, city workers cast puzzled glances their way and cut sharply around them. Scotese, 34, founded the Chicago Detours tour company in 2010....

It’s anyone’s guess what exploring “the domestic traumas of tradition in regression” might mean, though I imagine some kind of cannibalistic Thanksgiving. But the press-release anthropology-speak might be appropriate for “John DiCosmo and the Faces of Dinner,” centered on both the quirky mixed-media drawings and collages of New Jersey-based artist DiCosmo and on his meat-free re-creations of them in edible form, which viewers are invited to share. Also, DiCosmo and show organizer J....