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Hidden Gems When Kurt Serpin says he’s cooking Ottoman cuisine, he doesn’t mean the extravagant feasts of the sultans, but he is talking about the traditional Turkish cuisine that evolved from the sultans’ expansive palace kitchens. The menu at Cafe Orchid, his compact Lakeview restaurant, is diverse, covering the expected mezes (hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanoush, falafel), kebabs, and grilled seafood dishes (Serpin is from the Turkish city of Mersin, on the Mediterranean), but also a nice selection of less common items, like the tiny wontonlike pre-Ottoman meat dumplings known as manti, which arrive in a deep bowl of yogurt-tomato sauce....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since the infamous blizzard of 1979 changed Chicago’s political course, mayors have tried to stay prepared for a storm of Doctor Zhivago strength by keeping an auxiliary army of snow removal workers on call. Last fall the city inked new contracts with several private companies that agreed to be ready to mobilize 24/7 for the next five winters. If they’re not needed, the contractors don’t get paid....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The “classic” Breeders lineup—the one that recorded Last Splash 20 years ago and performed it in its entirety at Pitchfork over the summer—is back in town this Saturday, and they’re playing Last Splash again. While Last Splash is without a doubt an excellent record, what’s even more exciting about this tour is that the Dayton band will also be performing their debut, Pod, a record that’s a far cry from the Breeders that most casual listeners know....

Appropriated from a book he enjoyed reading to his kids, Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 painting Look Mickey shows Mickey Mouse stifling a laugh as Donald Duck pulls on a fishing line stuck through his own shirt and says, “Look Mickey, I’ve hooked a big one!!” Like Andy Warhol‘s first soup cans, the piece was a shot across the bow of abstract expressionism, and it placed Lichtenstein squarely at the center of the pop art movement....

The more I read about food and what it means, the less inclined I am to try to write about it, in large part because so many others have done it so well already. In the last few days I’ve been struck by the fact that some of the most thoughtful writing seems to come from people who profess to know very little about food. Tuesday’s New York Times profile of Charlie Trotter reminded me of a ten-year-old article by Martha Bayne—as does more or less everything I see about Trotter, since reading this is the closest I’ve come to dining at his restaurant....

Just want to hear some music? Skip to the bottom for two tracks by Tree. Johnson built Sunday School largely out of samples, often from classic soul songs, but his technique departs from the usual blueprint. He chops them up, processes them, and pieces them together, using odd edits and slight dissonances, so that they interweave and overlap in a way that can feel slightly “off,” though they’re never actually out of time with his lean, pulsing drum patterns....

Very little is known about Nat Turner, the black slave in Virginia’s Southampton County who led a revolt by more than 50 other black slaves in August 1831. Over two days they slaughtered 57 white men, women, and children, and after the rebellion was suppressed, 60 to 80 slaves were summarily executed and mutilated. As one historian notes in Charles Burnett’s hour-long TV documentary, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003), screening Sunday at the DuSable Museum of African American History, we have precise information about Turner’s victims but know almost nothing about the slaughtered blacks....

The LaSalle/Central TIF District There are many, many things wrong with Mayor Daley’s pet economic development tool, tax increment financing, but what tops my list is that while it’s intended to benefit poor, blighted communities, it ends up funneling hundreds of millions of dollars a year into wealthier ones. And there’s no better snapshot of how that happens than the LaSalle/Central TIF District, gerrymandered around one of the wealthiest chunks of real estate in Chicago: the Loop....

Critics have faulted this 2005 British feature about the Rwandan genocide for focusing on a couple of white characters instead of the 800,000 Tutsis who were slaughtered, but such easy judgments miss the point entirely: this is a spiritual drama, not a political one, drawing a thick line between our good intentions and the selfish choices we ultimately make. Based on a true story, it stars John Hurt as a weathered priest and Hugh Dancy as a young teacher who open the gates of their Catholic secondary school to some 2,500 Tutsi refugees as the killing rages outside....

For a week starting April 15, Black Ensemble Theater presents work by members of its Black Playwrights Initiative, a program designed to nurture talent on the company’s stage. The eighth annual Black Playwrights Festival is a showcase of new scripts by BET-affiliated artists—and part of founder Jackie Taylor’s vision to build an “anchor for a transformation” in Chicago. An opening gala on Mon 4/15 celebrates playwright and Obama liasion Paul Oakley Stovall, whose Immediate Family—about two bickering siblings, both black, one gay—ran at the Goodman last year....

If all goes according to plan and modern Chicago’s first all-local, humanely raised, whole-animal butchery opens next week, don’t be surprised if Rob Levitt talks you out of buying some pricey Dietzler Farms rib eyes and instead pushes something a little more economical, with less cachet. How about some sirloin flaps or spider steak? When I talked to Levitt a few weeks ago he’d just returned from a stage at Brooklyn’s Meat Hook—one of the more renowned shops in the movement—where he spent a few days cutting meat and familiarizing himself with the business end of a thriving butcher shop....

More than a year has passed since 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore edged out challenger Don Gordon by just 251 votes in last April’s aldermanic runoff. But in Rogers Park, political battles never really end—they just move on to other fronts. Right now the warring factions are fighting over the Park District’s Gale Community Center, a recently completed facility at Howard and Marshfield. In March 2007 construction finally began—just in time for an election-eve photo op of yet another ground-breaking....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sure, it’s a press release carefully constructed to sound nice. And certainly the alderman of the central business district needs to have a sound working relationship with the mayor. But if this isn’t simply ass-kissing political BS–if it’s any indication of the tone, style, and political approach Reilly will bring to the council in the next four years–the mayor and the machine Democrats who keep most of the seats warm in that esteemed chamber have to be just as eager to “work” with Reilly as he is with them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, a lot of history either concentrates on famous people who, odds are, you would never have gotten to meet if you’d lived at the same time, or tries to make sense of evidence assembled about the past (newspapers, public records) in order to assemble an argument. Which doesn’t help much when you just want to know how you might have gone to the bathroom in ancient Crete, where indoor plumbing was allegedly invented....

Because of “society” and “rules,” you pretty much have to have your torso covered in most social settings. And J. Dilla was one of the most important musicians of the past quarter century. These are facts, and a few smart people have combined them to produce J. Dilla-themed shirts that have quietly become some of the most iconic designs of the past decade. Local streetwear company No Love City is about to jump into the Dilla shirt game with one sporting a cartoony portrait of Jay Dee by Kid Ninja that the man himself would probably have gotten a kick out of....

The hijacking of the U.S. shipping vessel Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates in April 2009 struck many people as anachronistic: How could there still be pirates in the 21st century? Back then, more Americans were concerned with media piracy, people sneaking into theaters with cameras and selling bootleg copies of blockbusters like . . . Pirates of the Caribbean. Cable news stations went to town on the Maersk Alabama story and were rewarded with a slam-bang ending: on April 12, U....

Nearly every food book issued this season lives in the long shadow of Grant Achatz’s Alinea. But here are several fine volumes you might want to have a look at between skinning juniper berries and straining fennel stalk gelee. Along with other mammoth tomes by virtuosic toques like Achatz, Heston Blumenthal, and Thomas Keller, this 527-page volume by Spain’s padrino of techno-emotional cuisine seems part of a collective attempt to demystify the culinary movement of the moment....

Cooks With Books The Berghoff Family Cookbook: From Our Table to Yours, Celebrating a Century of Entertaining, Carlyn Berghoff and Nancy Ross Ryan (Andrews McMeel, $29.99) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » rrr Discreetly located in a town house spitting distance from chef Grant Achatz’s first employer, Charlie Trotter, Alinea is marked only by a valet’s sandwich board at the curb. Inside, a dining room and glass-walled kitchen share the first floor; up a set of glass stairs covered by metal mesh mats are two more small, luxuriously spare dining rooms....

In the Neighborhood Custom House500 S. Dearborn | 312-523-0200 rrr Don’t go to Eleven City Diner expecting the fast, brusque treatment you usually find in a traditional deli. Dinner service on a recent visit was slow (though not interminable) and polite to the point of approval seeking: a staffer made a special trip to the table to find out if the egg cream he’d made was up to par. (Yes.) Despite its unnerving lack of attitude, Eleven City offers other traditional trappings—there’s a pie case up front, and matzo ball soup, knishes, and tuna melts on the menu....

Every Friday night, the Kiss Kiss Cabaret takes audiences back to the vaudeville era. The Flattery Brothers host, and the “coquettes” perform their sexy solo acts on a stage draped with a shiny red curtain. The Claptrap Family Orchestra, accordion and all, provides the soundtrack. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s really important that our show be a mix of the cabaret,” says Kiss Kiss Cabaret producer and director Jenn Kincaid....