Chicago’s restaurant landscape is packed with spots that serve up painstakingly refined food with a particular punk-rock insouciance. The origins of that now familiar mix can be traced, in part, to a shabby-looking storefront wedged into an unremarkable stretch of Ashland Avenue in Wicker Park. Inside, the walls of the small, stark dining room are spray-painted black from the ground up to about the seven-foot mark—a look that suggests a pose of youthful rebellion somewhere between underground nightclub and shallow grave....

The first ten minutes of The Face of Love function as what might be called a statement of purposelessness, announcing exactly how and why the movie will be bad. A middle-aged woman (Annette Bening) sits in her nicely furnished home making distraught faces while flashbacks reveal a trip she took with her husband (Ed Harris) on their 30th wedding anniversary. He drowned during this trip, which must be the reason she looks so unhappy....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, July 5, 2017. New York Daily News responds to Rahm op-ed with “dumb track mind” and “murder capital mayor” cover Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s New York Times op-ed praising CTA trains and slamming New York City’s subway stem didn’t go over well. The New York Daily News slammed Emanuel on its cover Tuesday with the headlines “DUMB TRACK MIND,” “MURDER CAPITAL MAYOR HITS SUBWAY,” and “Rahm touts Chicago trains but, AT LEAST our riders don’t get SHOT on the way home!...

Just hours after the city of Chicago stunned many onlookers by agreeing to release video of the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old boy, the brother of another black Chicagoan shot and killed by police donned a familiar uniform of all-black clothing to attend a Chicago Police Board meeting, which he’s done every month for about half a year. The Independent Police Review Authority, the agency charged with investigating police misconduct and officer-involved shootings in Chicago, recommended Servin be fired in September, making him the second Chicago officer recommended for firing in an police-involved shooting since IPRA began in 2007....

It seems churlish to complain about the lack of ramen on the far north side when we’ve got so much pho and also a fair amount of matzo ball soup, but I can’t help feeling a twinge of envy when I read about all the exciting new ramen joints opening in Logan Square and Wicker Park. Is there some reason why those of us who live on the upper reaches of the Red Line don’t get to slurp our dinners, too?...

Divvy’s future wasn’t looking so bright a year ago, when the city of Chicago acknowledged it had seen a major drop in income from the bike-share system in 2016, after the program expanded farther into the south and west sides. But numbers I recently obtained from the Chicago Department of Transportation via a Freedom of Information Act request paint a much rosier picture, showing that 2017 was the city’s most lucrative year yet for Divvy revenue....

AP Photos Protesters in Saint Louis call for reforms after police shot and killed Michael Brown and, ten days later, Kajieme Powell. As you may remember, the August 9 death of Michael Brown after he was shot by a police officer in the Saint Louis suburb of Ferguson was followed—ten days of nationally covered civil protests later—by another police shooting in Saint Louis proper. Our understanding of Brown’s death is at best translucent—police saying one thing, witnesses another....

Now the three of you lie on the floor on your stomachs, sweaty forearms touching. It is almost like you are children again, playing invisible, and Sebastián, the youngest, has only left the room. Sebastián has your mother’s eyes, dust brown, while Lucía’s are the color of molasses. You had hoped they would be identical. When they were born, their hazelnut bodies still sticky and warm, Tía Rosa called them little angels....

For all the talk about movies being supplanted by cable TV series, this big-screen debut from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner proves that writing a feature film is a lot harder than it looks. A perpetually stoned TV weatherman in Annapolis (Owen Wilson) heads out to Amish country with his oafish bong buddy (Zach Galifianakis) after the latter learns that his wealthy father has died; the son inherits most of the father’s estate, which enrages his uptight sister (Amy Poehler), and the two friends vie for the love of the father’s young widow (Melissa Rauch, playing the kind of smart, offbeat dish that Don Draper always goes for)....

Lyric Opera/Todd Rosenberg Ana María Martíinez, up a tree in Rusalka More than a century after it was written, Lyric Opera is presenting Chicago with a ravishing premiere of Rusalka, Antonín Dvořák’s 1901 “fairy tale for adults.” The rhapsodic score—performed under the baton of conductor Sir Andrew Davis—has found a perfect match in director Sir David McVicar‘s stunning production. McVicar puts his Rusalka, soprano Ana María Martínez, through a performance nearly as strenuous physically as it is vocally....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, March 9, 2017. Journalist Jamie Kalven sues police for failure to release Laquan McDonald records Independent journalist Jamie Kalven is suing the Chicago Police Department for allegedly violating the Freedom of Information Act by not releasing records about the police’s alleged cover-up of the death of Laquan McDonald. Kalven requested the records from the Office of the Inspector General of Chicago’s investigation into police misconduct in the handling of McDonald’s fatal shooting but was denied on the grounds that Illinois’s FOIA law exempts inspector general investigations....

AP Photo/Seth Perlman The press makes way too much of something little—Jim Oberweis’s vacation in Florida. It’s tricky for political writers to frame a campaign story just before an election. Whether the story’s about a big deal or small potatoes will probably depend on the framing. Oberweis’s days in Florida were fair game for his opponent, who said they showed Oberweis’s lack of commitment to the Senate race and called him a “timid snowbird....

It’s part cabaret, part variety event, and part burlesque. Its overarching themes are body positivity, self-love, and acceptance: “Everybody, no matter what your body” is its mantra. Its cast is made up of a rotating assembly of professional and nonprofessional performers, dancers, and singers. And since its debut in 2009, The Fly Honey Show has moved from an intimate loft space to, as of this summer, the 150-seat Den Theatre. This year’s run is the production’s most ambitious season yet....

Last fall, shortly after Columbia College instructor Iymen Chehade showed the documentary 5 Broken Cameras in his course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he was summoned to a meeting with Steven Corey, chair of the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Science. In a phone interview Corey said he and Chehade talked at the meeting about presenting “multiple perspectives” in the course. He denied ever telling Chehade to be “more balanced,” and said he told the student to talk with him, then come back if things weren’t resolved....

When attorney Nicole Cantello went to work for the Environmental Protection Agency in 1990, she never imagined she’d wind up speaking at public rallies or giving interviews to reporters. “I spent 25 years being a happy bureaucrat working behind the scenes,” Cantello says. “I never talked to the press, never spoke at a rally. But they’ve dragged us kicking and screaming into the public arena.” It was Pruitt’s nomination that spurred Cantello and other EPA employees to action....

From Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo: “If we win the race, we become the heroes of the story!” In a post last week I considered the possible influence of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher on a key sequence of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. I failed to acknowledge, though, how this sequence is also highly characteristic of Linklater. To review, the passage finds a junior high-aged Mason walking and talking with a callous, go-getting female classmate who seems to be romantically interested in him....

The first time Greg Fischer made mead it was 1975, and he was 15 years old. “It was not very good,” he says of the alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey with yeast. “It tasted like rocket fuel. I said, ‘I’m not going to try that again.’” He’d been making wine since he was 12, learning the craft from his grandfather. “I made everything from dandelion wine to sassafras and wintergreen,” he says....

One of the most colorful and fluid rapper-singers to emerge from Chicagoland in the past few years built a foundation for his career on baseball. Tobi Adeyemi, who records and performs as Tobi Lou, started the decade as a professional ballplayer; he was an outfielder for the Joliet Slammers during their 2011 season. “I was making like $600 a month and living at my parent’s house,” he told DJ Booth earlier this year....

Baritone saxophonist Josh Sinton first played with bassist Jason Ajemian and drummer Chad Taylor in the 90s when they lived in Chicago, but they never formed a combo until recently, when they reconnected in New York. Taking their name from a slang term for a jazz cat coined decades ago by saxophonist Sidney Bechet, the trio have put out a superb debut album, Slow Learner (out Friday on Iluso), that sounds like they’ve been a band for much longer than they have....

Gender Breakdown, Collaboraction’s angry and absorbing ensemble piece about inequity in the theater community, is rooted in something equally dramatic, but a lot drier: a ten-month research project undertaken by Kay Kron, an actor, writer, and, currently, development associate at Chicago Children’s Theatre, as the “capstone” project for the DePaul University master’s degree in nonprofit management she’ll complete this year. Even allowing for the likely conservative tilt of the Jeff-nomination filter, those numbers are revealing: 75 percent of the plays produced in Chicago in 2015-2016 were written by men....