Posts

Jared Van Camp‘s ambitious grain-to-table program, which has the kitchen milling its own flour for bread, pasta, and pizza, achieves its highest pinnacle in the rustic shapes he’s hand-rolling and machine-extruding. Camp’s southern-Italian-style spaghetti, lightly dressed with tomato and bread crumbs and salted with cured tuna loin shavings, is thick and ruddy with a pronounced nutty flavor, and it sets a new standard for restaurant pasta arts. Similarly, the black squid ink strozzapreti (gnarly cavatelli-like twists tossed with sweet lobster and chile and served cold) and the radiatore (dark brown corkscrews with duck, mushrooms, and pork cracklings) are among the most scarfable peasant-style pastas I’ve encountered....

It starts with the Bean, really. If it weren’t for the obligation to haul out-of-town visitors to Millennium Park so they can gawk at fun-house-mirror versions of themselves and the surrounding downtown, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to lead them ten yards east to the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, place my elbow on its western sill, and act like I know what’s what about the outdoor venue’s state-of-the-art acoustics system. Dreamed up by Frank Gehry, the Pavilion is designed to distribute sound evenly across a spider web of suspended speakers, so that those lounging on the lawn, glasses of Malbec in hand, can enjoy the same aural experience as those sitting fifth row center—or something like that....

Bertram Cope’s Year by Henry Blake Fuller Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1919, at the age of 62, Henry Blake Fuller was one of Chicago’s leading literary lights—the author of several novels and a contributor to publications such as Harper’s and the Dial who counted among his friends and admirers figures like Jane Addams, Hamlin Garland, and Thornton Wilder. Despite his reputation, however, he was forced to self-publish his sixth novel, Bertram Cope’s Year, one of the first American literary works about homosexuality....

“If the clan in this play had been Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, or Buddhist, no theater would have touched it” [Tent Meeting review by Mary Shen Barnidge, Section 2, May 11]. How could the play have been about Jews, Catholics, Muslims, or Buddhists, considering it’s set in postwar Arkansas, and it centers around a family’s journey to hold a Baptist tent meeting? Why even make such a nonsensical comment at the top of the review?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If it’s your first day at the Pitchfork Music Festival, check Miles Raymer’s introduction for general info. We have reviews of all of Sunday’s acts, but the itineraries we have from staff and other contributors may be more helpful for planning your day. For today, we’ve got Raymer (“1 PM: Drink water. Drink another water right after that. Maybe also one of those vegan frappuccinos from the hippie food stand”), editor Mara Shalhoup (“I don’t love Vampire Weekend and I still don’t care what anyone says”), contributor Luca Cimarusti (“You can hear Beach House and Vampire Weekend anytime you turn on modern-rock radio or step into a Gap”), Chic-a-Go-Go cohost Ratso (“Being an underage puppet with tinnitus, my recommendations are suspect”), and attorney Barry Owen, one of the winners of our Pitchfork itinerary contest (“I’m going to need more beer than I thought”)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A copy of The 100 Best Restaurants of North America and Europe, New York-based food blogger (Opinionated About Dining) Steve Plotnicki’s new self-published guide, arrived at the Reader office yesterday. Chicago doesn’t feature prominently in the ambitious attempt to move into Zagat and Michelin’s territory, to say the least. Alinea does show up in slot six with an impressive score of 106 out of 120 (which puts it in the category of “worth planning a trip around”), but the only other Chicago restaurant that makes it in is Avenues, and its score of 99 only qualifies it as an “important local choice....

Earth Day Events friday18 Chicagoland: Tearing Down Its Suburban Heritage The Chicago Architecture Foundation offers back-to-back lectures on this theme for its Saturday Symposium. At 12:15 PM Genell Scheurell of the National Trust for Historic Preservation speaks on “Sustainability, Preservation and Teardowns,” then at 1 PM Mike Jackson of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency asks, “Can Teardowns Be Green?” Lunch is included. a10 AM-3:30 PM, Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan, 312-922-3432, ext....

Most flea and antique markets charge a few bucks for admission; pony up the big bucks and some will let you in early, before the masses arrive. Many markets shut down in the winter, so if you get the bug to browse in December, call or check the market’s Web site first to make sure it’s open. “Alsip is mostly newer stuff, and it’s mostly an indoor market. Buyingwise, it’s a crapshoot....

I am a CPDT and I think the article [“Who Should You Trust to Train Your Dog?” April 6] was very well written. One thing I wanted to point out in regards to the two books you mentioned: Most and Koehler. There is one huge qualitative difference between the two that drives their content and their message. Most comes from a place of complete respect for the dog; Koehler comes from a place of almost contempt for any dog that doesn’t get it or do the right thing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “More than 50 men alleged that they were tortured by Burge and his detectives during Daley’s term as Cook County state’s attorney, from 1981 to 1989. He was put on notice several times, most dramatically in the case of Andrew Wilson. Photographs of Wilson’s stitches, burns, and alligator- clip wounds made compelling evidence in court, underlined by Hyman’s failure to ask if Wilson had given his statement voluntarily....

The header on the menu of the Doubletree Hotel’s new Markethouse (611 N. Fairbanks, 312-224-2200) promises a marriage of “heartland basics with new cooking styles and ingredients, so you’ll find surprising twists to otherwise well-known dishes.” I assume that refers to eyeball grabbers like the goat cheese nougat with apple and beet salad, the pistachio brittle with squash soup, or the pickled Asian pear with diver scallops. In execution, I’m not sure those represent anything more radical than creative applications of classic techniques, but chef Scott Walton’s steering of the seasonal/local bandwagon ought to pack in the hotel guests, if not necessarily to locals, who have an increasing number of similarly driven chefs to follow....

Michael Gebert Over the past 40 years Villa Park-based Supreme Lobster, which supplies fresh fish to many of the top restaurants and retailers in Chicago, from Grace to Eataly, as well as vast quantities of frozen product in the food-service sector, has grown into the largest fish distributor in the U.S. A few years ago I shot video of its massive warehouses and spent a good deal of time talking with Carl Galvan, a former chef and line cook who handles the high-end restaurant accounts and made a name for himself back then pioneering the use of some new gadget called Twitter to let chefs know what was fresh off the boats (by way of O’Hare)....

QAfter six months of marriage—I’m a straight male—the sex had become routine but enjoyable. To remedy this, my wife and I discussed new things we might like to try. We were both being shy, so I said the first thing that came to mind: “Anal?” My wife got quiet and the conversation ended. Backing up a bit: Straight men who are curious about anal penetration—the penetration of their own anuses—often create elaborate fantasy scenarios in which they’re compelled to submit....

Bars TK Performing Arts TK Parks & Recreation TK Kasey’s Tavern The erstwhile charm of this old Printers Row neighborhood joint, currently in the midst of a radical remodeling, seems to have been sucked away by the solid line of flat-screen TVs now installed above the bar—slack-jawed patrons stare silently upward as if at a shuttle disaster. But the imported beer selection is good, you can order food from Hackney’s, and the microwave popcorn is still free....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Plant, John Edel‘s in-the-works vertical farm (which Mike Sula first wrote about last year and I covered in my story on Plant tenants New Chicago Brewing Company) has secured grants for $1.5 million from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity for building an anaerobic digester. The renewable energy system is intended to break down food scraps and spent grains (from brewing) and turn it into electricity and heat to power all the businesses in the Plant—including the brewery, an aquaponics growing system, and a shared kitchen and bakery—allowing it to be independent of the grid....

On Monday, June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Chicago’s 28-year-old handgun ban unconstitutional. Over the next four days, Mayor Daley muscled the Chicago City Council into passing a hastily drafted ordinance that places a whole new set of limitations and regulations on gun ownership in the city. “It’s something he’s got to have if he’s running for reelection next year,” the alderman said. “To me this is the kind of forward-looking thinking we need to embrace in every area of government,” Daley said....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today’s 12 O’Clock Track comes from the Charm City quartet’s forthcoming Drag City debut, Natural History, and it’s reminiscent of mid-90s Rollins Band—fractured, grunge heavy, and possessed. Front man Andrew Laumann tears through the guitar noise and pummeling drums with strangled yips and bloody-hell shouting that together sound like something you’d hear coming from the inpatient wing of a shock-therapy facility....

With just a few weeks to go in Mayor Daley’s regime, I headed to City Hall to check out one of the last rounds of Tax Increment Financing handouts of the era—that is, the April 12 meeting of the Community Development Commission, which oversees the mayor’s $500-million-a-year TIF program. Good thing the city and schools aren’t broke. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This time, actually, I couldn’t really complain about most of their recommendations, which get passed on to the City Council for approval (and it always does approve)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » HBO’s new series Getting On—an adaptation of a BBC sitcom by the creators of Big Love—makes no effort to portray being old and infirm, and being surrounded by the old and infirm, as anything less than grim as fuck. Naturally, it’s a comedy. The feces—”a feces,” according to one nurse, because “it wasn’t a gang of them, it was just one piece”—becomes the narrative device through which we learn about the hospital’s female staff and their hierarchy....

Gary Isaacs David Eugene Edwards of Wovenhand I saw Sigur Ros for the first time last Tuesday. For those of you unfamiliar with the Icelandic postrock band’s live theater, it consists of massive video components (often projecting images of cliffs and/or rippling waves) and a cathartic light show—as the two showgoers who fainted right by me might have described it. And depending on your mood, the spectacle (and crescendo after crescendo) can either soak you in or make you scrounge around for any sort of makeshift pillow....