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Resavoir Mike Smith Quartet Finalist: Heisenberg Uncertainty Players

Empty Bottle Runner-Up: Lincoln Hall

Cork & Kerry at the Park Turtle’s Bar & Grill

You’ve done this. The commenters weren’t entirely wrong. Chicago naturally shares a lot with our nation’s largest cities. However, Chicago is as midwestern as the corn that surrounds it. Even more, it’s the capital of the region. And we should embrace it. A recent study by the Economic Innovation Group compared economic and quality of life characteristics for several midsize midwestern metros, comparing South Bend, Indiana (home to former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who served as mayor from 2012 to 2020), and other similarly sized metros in the region with other metros throughout the country, examining the period between 2007 and 2016....

There’s plenty to do in Chicago this week. Here are some of our recommendations: Thu 9/22: Author Stacy Schiff discusses her book The Witches: Salem, 1692 tonight at the Newberry Library (60 W. Walton). 6 PM

In the Chinese drama Angels Wear White, screening this week at Gene Siskel Film Center, writer-director Vivian Qu addresses the issue of corruption in contemporary Chinese society. The subject may be familiar to anyone who’s kept up with Chinese cinema over the past two decades, but Qu’s approach is somewhat novel in that she considers the issue from a female perspective. Angels follows the police investigation of a government official suspected of having sexually assaulted two 12-year-old girls at a seaside motel in the western city of Binhai; rather than focus on the official, Liu (who barely appears), Qu looks at the assault victims as well as the female employees at the motel, who become witnesses in the investigation....

During a seven-month investigation into reported druggings in Chicago’s comedy scene, several people told the Reader they’d heard about a man being drugged at iO Theater’s 2015 holiday party. Though we tried, we were unable to identify the comedian before publishing the story. Once the story ran, however, the man reached out to the Reader via e-mail. He feared that going to the police would be fruitless and might harm iO’s reputation, so instead of filing a police report, Jordan mentioned the incident to iO’s bar staff and told them to keep their eyes peeled....

Many prolific musicians call Chicago home, but multi-instrumentalist Ben Baker Billington is a veritable Energizer Bunny. He’s been contributing otherworldly experimental sounds to the scene since his mid-aughts stint in noise project Druids of Huge, and his musical resumé is too long to reproduce in full here. Any outre artist looking for an open-minded collaborator with a refined ear and exacting technique would be well advised to call on Billington, and many have: he’s played drums for free-jazz misfits Tiger Hatchery, industrial-gospel legends Ono, and twisted psych-improv outfit ADT, as well as in the backing bands of Ryley Walker and Circuit des Yeux....

Mia Francesca Iguana Bistro + Cafe Finalists: Funkenhausen, Flat & Point, Pizzeria Uno

Just when I thought I could take no more depressing news about COVID-19, or Trump, or our impending economic collapse, along comes the city with a little happy news to lift me from my funk . . . Tax increment financing is a program in which the city slaps an undisclosed surcharge on your property taxes and diverts the money into a slush fund the mayor is pretty much free to spend as she wants....

The COVID-19 pandemic has left indoor dining in a constant state of flux in Chicago. As bars and restaurants throughout the city are scrambling to make outdoor dining as comfortable as possible for guests, rigged tarps and igloos aren’t exactly ideal conditions to sip craft cocktails as temps continue to drop. Luckily, curating a bar cart at home is a simple alternative to catch a buzz without freezing your ass off....

Abu Hani opened his first restaurant in 2000, when he was an ambitious 17-year-old student at Theodore Roosevelt High School. His first kitchen was his mother’s. Growing up in Mayfair, he used to help her cook elaborate feasts to break the Ramadan fast. After marrying, he and his wife would take annual months-long trips back to Yemen, where he learned at his grandmother’s side in the city of Aden, just west of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which divides the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden....

Atorina Zomaya was raised in a close-knit Assyrian American family in Rogers Park that revolved around food. “Pretty much everything was homemade—breads, yogurt, cheeses—according to ancient family recipes,” she says. “After learning more about the recipes that were recorded on these clay tablets, I realized not much has changed in modern Assyrian food culture,” notes Zomaya. But Assyrian cuisine has one key ingredient that sets it apart from the rest of the Middle East: alcohol, found in the wine, wheat beer, and anise- flavored arak, brewed and distilled since ancient times....

Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises Boka Restaurant Group Finalists: One Off Hospitality Group, Mia Francesca’s, Uno’s Pizzeria & Grill

When he was a kid in Rogers Park, Matthew-Lee Erlbach says trips to theaters like Lifeline and TimeLine and excursions to downtown museums were just “part of the vocabulary of growing up in a city that is so rich in its arts and culture and that appreciates arts and culture workers.” Those twin loves of art and labor activism are now combined in his work for the DAWN (Defend Arts Workers Now) Act, created with his friends and colleagues at Be An Arts Hero, a grassroots organization formed to advocate for federal relief for the arts....

Lora Drobetsky, an Ashkenazi Jew from Uzbekistan, emigrated to the U.S. in 1990 and settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Drobetsky was then a 23-year-old single mom with a two-year-old daughter. On a trip to New York that year, she visited Trump Tower, the lavish skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. “It was breathtaking,” she recalls. “You walk in and you’re in paradise. The waterfalls. Everything’s pink and shiny and gorgeous. It’s so big....

Joe Gibbons in Confessions of a Sociopath Tomorrow night at 7 PM the Nightingale will present a program of works by Joe Gibbons, who’s been making experimental films and videos since the mid-1970s. Over the course of his four-decade career, the Whitney Biennial has included his work on four separate occasions, and he’s been a mainstay of underground film festivals across the country. Gibbons has taught at Bard College and at MIT, and in 2001 he was honored with a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship....

D.C. punk legends Fugazi took an indefinite hiatus in 2003, though they’ve continued to flood the world with new music—or unreleased recordings, anyway. In 2011 the band launched the Fugazi Live Series, a site archiving hundreds of concert recordings that showcase their exceptional improvisational skills. Punks may shudder to think of it this way, but Fugazi weren’t far removed from the Grateful Dead . . . at least when it came to transforming songs in concert via jamming....