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Terri Hemmert Lin Brehmer 

Jerry’s Runner-Up: Bari

It’s Taco Tuesday, the busiest night of the week at Buena Vista in East Lakeview. The line is out the door and the small dining room is packed with customers as the smell of chorizo and homemade tortillas fills the air. In the back of the house, members of the Ramirez family operate in organized chaos as they navigate the narrow walkways of the kitchen, putting out order after order and never stopping to take a break....

One of the most fascinating developments to keep tabs on in genre film is the push to diversify storytelling at a large scale. As long as horror continues to exist, there will always be chain saws, monsters, gore, and all the other tropes we’ve come to associate with the genre. But now more than ever, there is ample room to experiment with depicting less traditional but all-too-real social horrors like oppression, injustice, and a general lack of power....

The double album Houston 2012 captures a two-day encounter in October 2012 between English tabletop guitarist Keith Rowe and the experimental-music community of Houston, Texas. Rowe’s visit came about thanks to the initiative of Saint Louis double bassist Damon Smith, who lived in Texas at the time. While there Smith developed a strong working relationship with Sandy Ewen, who’s not only a splendid, unconventional guitarist but also an organizer committed to facilitating women’s access to the arts....

Though they tend to get overlooked when people remember the alt-rock scene of the 90s, pop trio Velvet Crush remains one of my favorite bands from the era. Its members had previously bounced around in several groups—the Reverbs, Choo Choo Train, Honeybunch, Bag O’Shells, and the Springfields, most of them aligned with the prolific late-80s jangle-pop community in Champaign—but they reached their peak as a unit. Drummer Ric Menck (a native of suburban Barrington) and bassist Paul Chastain (from Champaign) also worked frequently with Matthew Sweet’s touring band around the time of his 1991 classic Girlfriend—Menck actually plays on some of the album....

Amuse 126 instagram.com/amuse.126 Runner-Up: Jaime Knight

Luella’s Southern Kitchen 4609 N. Lincoln 773-961-8196 luellassouthernkitchen.com Runner-Up: Soul Veg

From Brianna Wellen’s introduction, “Losses and gains: Best of Chicago 2020”: Some business to get out of the way: the reader poll results were determined by you, the readers! If you’re angry about the results, you only have yourselves to blame! Let this be a reminder to keep a close eye on when voting begins next year so you can campaign for your favorites to get the top spot. Or better yet, share your own losses and gains on social media and tag us @Chicago_Reader with the hashtags #bestofchi and #BoC2020....

Like a cross between The Santaland Diaries and Sunset Boulevard, Jonathan Tolins’s 2013 one-man comedy sends up the lifestyle of the haves through the eye of the have-nots. Inspired by Barbra Streisand’s book My Passion for Design, it’s the story of struggling LA actor Alex More (Scott Gryder) who takes a job in the make-believe shopping mall in the basement of Streisand’s Malibu estate and is horrified to learn how the other half really lives....

GlenStar, the luxury developer at odds with 41st Ward alderman Anthony Napolitano over a proposed 299-unit apartment building near the Cumberland Blue Line, has sued the city in an attempt to secure the necessary zoning changes to proceed with construction. But buried in its demands that a judge find city officials’ actions regarding its proposed building unlawful is a major legal challenge to the age-old practice of “aldermanic prerogative.” GlenStar’s attorney, Peter Friedman, explains that the developer played by both the formal and informal rules from the beginning....

Stan’s Donuts Do-Rite Donuts Finalists: Firecakes Donuts, Dinkel’s Bakery

El Milagro Tortillas Upton’s Naturals Finalists: Co-Op Sauces, Phoenix Bean, Pizzeria Uno

Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative When I interviewed artist Theaster Gates for a Reader profile in 2011, the Dante Harper Chicago Public Housing project two blocks from his home was boarded up and deserted. A series of two-story redbrick town houses that spread across two blocks on 70th Street in the Grand Crossing neighborhood, it had been abused, but had pleasing lines and was only 31 years old. Gates, his Rebuild Foundation, and his partners at Brinshore Development were proposing a public-private redevelopment for it designed by Landon Bone Baker Architects....

Little House facebook.com/littlehousechicago Somewhere in Pilsen there’s a private residence with a do-it-yourself approach to film exhibition. As commercial theaters increasingly resemble bars and restaurants, Little House proves that the formula for presenting great movies is still a projector, a screen, and an eager crowd. The programmers favor experimental, classic, and underground films, almost everything projected from celluloid, but the lineup is kept secret until the audience arrives. Sometimes the screenings are heavily curated, sometimes they’re thrown together at the last minute....

Ariana Grande has dominated TMZ headlines and pop charts this year—the latter with a series of confessional singles whose lyric sheets could be pages from her diary. And Grande has had a lot to process lately. In 2017, she survived a deadly terrorist attack at her concert at Britain’s Manchester Arena. In 2018, her long-term love and ex-boyfriend Mac Miller died of an overdose. Soon after, her engagement to Saturday Night Live It Boy Pete Davidson fell apart under intense media scrutiny....

Canadian dance producer Jacques Greene (born Philippe Aubin-Dionne) broke out in the early 2010s by twisting R&B vocals into stuttering, waterlogged samples that brought complex shades of sadness to energetic club tracks. He’s since relied less on a sample-based approach, which has opened him up stylistically and helped him arrive at the free-flowing aesthetic of his recent second album, October’s Dawn Chorus (LuckyMe). Greene parlays his grasp of dance’s history into a mishmash of sounds, sometimes within a single song; on “Do It Without You” he blends the spacey affectations of early-2000s UK dubstep with ersatz drum ’n’ bass percussion....

Two of the art world’s most controversial current works are on display in the new exhibit “Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014,” which opened at the Art Institute last Friday. Huck and Jim never made it to the Whitney at all. It was rejected before completion, when, as Calvin Tomkins reports in a recent New Yorker profile of Ray, the Whitney curators decided it wouldn’t be appropriate to put the work in the path of the general public....

“Gezelligheid” is a Dutch word for a feeling of coziness, a sense of loving belonging. Singer-songwriter Andrew Bird has adopted it as the name of his annual hometown performance series—a rare opportunity to see the Chicago expat in an intimate setting. The low lighting in the beautiful Fourth Presbyterian Church on Chestnut, where he’s held the shows for several years now, exudes an inviting warmth that blankets the tightly packed pews, which suddenly feel very far from the cold outside....