If you’re the Chicago chef who stole one of her own cookbooks from Diana Kennedy’s kitchen, she has your number. As for the Chicago chef who stole her book, we vowed to hunt him down and administer brutal justice when we got home, but Kennedy couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell us his name.
Taste of Chicago cityofchicago.org Runner-Up: Baconfest
Half Acre’s Daisy Cutter halfacrebeer.com Runner-Up: Revolution’s Anti-Hero IPA
What About Chicago? Car con Carne Finalist: AudPod
Actors Gymnasium
Frank Maugeri knows something about picking himself up after a shutdown. When Redmoon Theatre, the spectacle-oriented company where Maugeri worked for 23 years (the last few as producing artistic director) folded in 2015 in the wake of the failure of the Great Chicago Fire Festival, Maugeri took some time to regroup (including a stint developing education and community engagement programs with Chicago Children’s Theatre). Then in 2017, Maugeri unveiled his new company, Cabinet of Curiosity, which, in Maugeri’s words, focuses on “this desire to investigate the spiritual, the sacred, and the supernatural through objects, devices, actors, and songs....
The stench of chlorine was disorienting. I had expected, upon entering a facility that bills itself as one of the state’s largest producers of legal weed, to encounter the sweet, pungent odor of raw marijuana baking under a string of LED lights. But here I was, getting my first glimpse of the place in a four-by-five-foot foyer that looked like the entrance to a heavily secured doctor’s office and smelled like a public pool....
In the category of closing the gate after the horse has bolted from the pasture, Mayor Rahm fired Ed Burke as chair of the all-important City Council finance committee after the feds indicted the 14th Ward alderman on charges of shaking down a Burger King franchisee. In the aftermath of Burke’s indictment, Mayor Emanuel put on his sad and somber face—as though he were really hurt and surprised by what went down—and told the Tribune that public servants must have “a moral and ethical compass that informs your judgment of right from wrong....
Clare Byrne Ryan Duggan Finalists: Jay Ryan, Bill Connors
Doug Shorts Upon my arrival in Chicago in 2012, Doug Shorts was in the midst of a renaissance. While the baritone and fourth-degree black belt was issuing vintage recordings on Jazzman and Numero Group (now my employer), pressing new 45s on Cherries, and tracking with the Dap-Kings, my quest for self-improvement was taking me to the gym, where I mostly watched Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives from a treadmill. One night at the Owl, I confessed to Shorts that I was trying to get in shape and had harbored a fascination with karate since childhood....
Momotaro 820 W. Lake 312-733-4818momotarochicago.com
Big Thief’s gentle, gorgeous folk rock belies its gloomiest themes. As Adrianne Lenker, the guitarist and vocalist of the Brooklyn indie band, told Uproxx in June, the combination of mellifluous music and unnerving, painful themes on the group’s recent sophomore album, Capacity (Saddle Creek), comes less by intention than by simply letting the pieces of a song fall where they may: “I’m not really filtering what I’m writing about or attempting to write about just the sweet stuff....
Harlem’s Cam’ron is the undisputed king of out-there, freaky rappers, having paved the way for weirdo individualism in hip-hop with his wardrobe of ankle-length mink coats and head-to-toe, bright-pink get-ups, his idiosyncratic slurred flow, his numerous public feuds with all sorts of rap stars, and his incredibly tense on-air confrontation with Bill O’Reilly in 2003. Rising rap stars like Young Thug and Lil Uzi Vert have borrowed some of his antics and aesthetics for their own personas....
Metalcore supergroup Old Man Gloom have often fallen silent for years at a stretch, but for two decades now they’ve occasionally emerged from the depths with an offering of their signature celestial sludge. This summer they’re delivering new material as a pair of albums, an approach they’ve used twice before (with Seminar II and Seminar III in 2001 and the twin Ape of God releases in 2014). Seminar VIII: Light of Meaning and Seminar IX: Darkness of Being (both on Profound Lore) are the first new Old Man Gloom releases since the 2018 passing of bassist and vocalist Caleb Scofield....
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.
I know a fair amount about plants, and gardening, and the pending environmental disaster that we euphemistically refer to as climate change. In fact, I spent two and a half years as a small-scale organic farmer in Detroit, and could probably have thrown together a good 5,000 words about common household substances that not only support your gut microflora but will double the size of your beets—which’ll prove helpful in preparing for the next Ice Age....
QI’m a (mostly) straight male who’s been dating the same woman for more than a year. It’s easily the best relationship I’ve been in. We get along great and rarely fight, and the sex has been great. But there were a few incidents recently when in the heat of the moment she asked me to tell her what I wanted to do, and I froze. I didn’t know what she expected me to say or do....
