Lincoln Square Massage 4757 N. Hermitage

jillianconley.blogspot.com Runner-Up The Old Neighborhood by Bill Hillmann

Elizabeth Restaurant 4835 N. Western Runner-Up Cherry Circle Room

Human Feel Oh man, New Order is in town this week—I saw them at last year’s Lollapalooza, and it was legitimately mind-blowing. Too bad for us, that show is sold out. But, there’s still tons of other great stuff to see this week as we close in on Independence Day. “Since forming My Brightest Diamond in the mid-aughts, Shara Worden has gotten increasingly ambitious, putting her classical training to excellent use in fleet, sophisticated arrangements that wriggle, strut, and float around her crystalline voice....

Evanston Runner-Up Oak Park

Twenty-eight-year-old grad student Rachel Hardeman tiptoes into Professor Zelda Kahn’s Cambridge office (Harvard? MIT?) with such diffidence that you half expect her to change her mind and tiptoe back out, no one the wiser. She doesn’t do that. And yet she doesn’t go so far as to make her presence known, either. She simply stands there—timidly, it seems—waiting for the professor to look up from her papers and register her presence....

Most good documentaries are powered by conflict, and you couldn’t ask for a struggle more elemental or relevant to our time than the one chronicled in Citizen Jane: Battle for the City. Director Matt Tyrnauer revisits the ongoing contest in the 1950s and ’60s between Jane Jacobs, the populist author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Robert Moses, the imperious master builder of New York City, who championed massive tower blocks and expressways in his plans to modernize Manhattan....

For this year’s Reader Key Ingredient Cook-Off, we asked some of Chicago’s top chefs to create a dish to honor a person who influenced their cooking. The exercise stirred many kitchen memories. Dish: Duck, pheasant, quail, and foie gras pativier Tsaknis’s dish was the crowd favorite at the Key Ingredient Cook-Off.

Emily Stewart, executive chef at Bang Bang Pie & Biscuits, says that umeboshi “tastes like a Warhead that’s been tossed in vinegar, but with the texture of a pickled smushy fruit.” Made from the ume fruit, which is often referred to as a Japanese plum but is actually more like an apricot, umeboshi are packed in salt and left to ferment in their own liquid. “[Ume] are naturally salty and sour, and then [the Japanese] really lean into that flavor profile,” Stewart says....

Last week, a Northwestern University student rocked the campus by filing a federal lawsuit against the university for failing to take adequate action on her two-year-old complaint of sexual harassment against an NU professor. Here’s the version of events according to the lawsuit, filed February 10 by the student’s attorney, Kevin O’Connor: The lawsuit states that her memory was fading “in and out” and that she recalls being in an elevator and going back to his apartment, with him groping her while she begged him to stop; then she recalls waking up at 4 AM....

Art with a social justice bent has “the potential for sparking conversation—bringing people in from all over who can talk about the issues that are up,” Weinberg says. “Lately we’ve been talking to legislators and suggesting that they could come together in a bipartisan way and actually meet in the gallery and have their conversations because it’s a neutral ground. We’re not taking a stand, telling them to do this or do that—we’re just presenting information they can think about....

Chris Greene Quartet www.chrisgreenejazz.com @chrisgreenejazz Runner-Up Sabertooth

Wikimedia Commons Jonathan Swift* The question raised by the great Alinea debate—do little children belong in any restaurant that doesn’t serve food on plastic trays or send a clown around the tables twisting balloons into animals?—is not a new one. Alinea’s Grant Achatz told me roughly the same thing. There have been other crying babies at Alinea, he said; the problem with this one was that the four adults at the table refused to do anything about it....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • What Aziz Ansari had to say about acting, race, and Hollywood? —Sue Kwong

Earlier this month I wrote about the superb toy-piano player Phyllis Chen. A deeply inventive and creative musician, Chen has helped to expand the instrument’s repertoire into something of great breadth and possibility through her efforts as the organizer of the UnCaged Toy Piano Composition Competition and her own imagination as a musician. More recently I’ve been listening to Shadow Piano (Innova), a terrific album of dark, probing music performed by Xenia Pestova, a Russian-born musician now based in Wales, that includes a couple of intense toy-piano works in addition to music written for conventional piano and electronics....

The popular narrative of the historically mild winter of 2016-2017 is that Chicagoans have, if you’ll excuse the expression, dodged a bullet. Zero measurable snowfall in the months of January and February? Unheard of in 146 years of National Weather Service record keeping. Leaving aside all the disturbing climate-change implications, a handful of 60- and 70-degree days in February are phenomena to which we all can surely grow accustomed. And yet ....

Last month state rep Barbara Flynn Currie came to the City Council to let Mayor Rahm Emanuel know what was what with his request for more state aid for his burgeoning teacher pension problems. Well, last week the mayor let Madigan know just what he thought of the message Currie delivered. Emanuel unveiled a plan to extend and expand the Midwest TIF district, which will end up siphoning off tens of millions of property tax dollars, none of it guaranteed to help the schools....

Corner Stores I almost recommended Under the Same Sun—a well-intentioned but inescapably clunky Israeli-Palestian coproduction screening twice next week at the Gene Siskel Film Center—on the basis of the remarkable short film preceding it at both screenings. Running only 25 minutes, Amina Waheed’s Corner Stores manages to say a good deal about inner-city America in general and Englewood in particular, and it delivers a moving character portrait to boot. This documentary centers on Falah Farhoudeh (aka “Abu Muhammad”), a Middle Eastern emigre in his late 60s who’s operated a convenience store in Englewood for about a decade....

If you’re looking for a musical figure to represent the vast and boundless aesthetics of electronic music, you can’t go wrong with Luke Vibert, a producer who’s released music under more stage names than some midcareer musicians have albums (he’s got ten, including his given name, Wagon Christ, and Plug). A native of Cornwall, UK, Vibert imbibed electronic music, hip-hop, and patches of underground rock and pop music while growing up in the 80s....