A cozy, classy place with exposed-brick walls and wood floors and tables and a shiny zinc bar, HQ Howard Quintero appears at first glance to check the boxes for elevated comfort food, a trend that doesn’t yet appear to have worn out its welcome. The menu, however, is fairly straightforward, with entries like buffalo wings, loaded fries, airline chicken, and meat loaf. They’re gussied up just a touch—roasted red pepper and walnuts in the mac ‘n’ cheese, kale chips to go with the beer-braised short ribs and horseradish-garlic mashed potatoes, onion-date jam on the pot roast sandwich—but nothing to scare off an unadventurous diner....

Vamos make the kind of slaphappy, feral rock ’n’ roll that’s got a tectonic power, which is why in 2015 local music site cum label Midwest Action asked front man Ryan Murphy which building he’d want to destroy with his band’s sound. (Murphy’s answer: “Trump Tower or the DMV.”) It’s all well and good to marvel at the band’s musical muscle, but they’re an impressive force in the local rock ecosystem because of how they move all that mass....

AP Photo/M. Spencer Green The $10 million man Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About the Chicago Police Department’s efforts to keep its use of cell-phone-tracking equipment—like Stingray technology—secret? —Mick Dumke • About the keys to practicing music effectively? —Kate Schmidt

F In the Fade delves deeper into the protagonist’s grief than Head On ever dares. Akin shows only the aftermath of the blast, sticking with Katja as she rolls up to the police cordon in her car, makes a mad dash for the crime scene, and gets tackled by police. Later, when she learns that a man and a boy have been killed and the police ask her for a DNA sample, Katja howls and collapses, writhing on the floor....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Shawn Sturges, 31, blind climber. After I lost my sight, I did various things to try to help navigate the world of blindness and help me with the depression I faced. I did martial arts, I did a little bit of wakeboarding, I tried skydiving a couple times. But I never really found any sport that could help me be as creative and athletic as I was before I lost my sight....

Immersive holiday shows in Chicago usually mean Halloween fare—haunted houses lend themselves naturally to the form, after all. But Chicago Immersive makes its inaugural bow with a family-friendly Hanukkah show so ecumenical in appeal it even takes place in a Lutheran church basement. Part scavenger hunt, part history lesson, part time-traveling adventure, the show involves a search for a menorah that belonged to the family of Grace (Nicole Bloomsmith), a contemporary woman who has only photos (and the audience) to help her piece together the puzzle of what happened to the beloved artifact, which disappeared around the time her great-grandparents left Germany ahead of Hitler....

In October 2019, Manae Hammond hopped in a car and drove from Chicago to Akron, Ohio, with her friend Eric Christopher. They’d known each other for a month, and they were heading to the first show by their band Hospital Bracelet. It’d been Christopher’s acoustic solo project for three months, and would end up operating as a live band for just five more before the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to concerts indefinitely....

S helved to the left of Barack Obama and directly below a scowling Clint Eastwood sits a hand-painted mug bearing the image of collector Stephen M. Mullins. The 85-year-old is recognizable in mug form because of the bespectacled face and balding crown. A smaller, bathing-suit-clad version of Mullins perches on the figure’s right shoulder. The placard below the mug announces his title: Curator, American Toby Jug Museum. The white label is equal in size and grandeur to those identifying Obama and Eastwood, a hint at the lack of hierarchy found among the nearly 8,300 figural pieces in the Evanston-based collection....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, May 18, 2016. Viral video shows huge fight on the near west side A disturbing video of a fight involving around 60 people near Jackson and Western is making the rounds on social media. The fight was a gang “turf war,” and a police squad car was nearby as the fight unfolded, according to a witness, the owner of a store close to the brawl....

If you’re an Instagram user, you’ve probably noticed a hashtag called #2017bestnine circulating in your feed during the past few weeks. It’s from the Top Nine app, first launched in 2015, on which users enter their Instagram handle into a field and an algorithm forms a collage of the nine most popular photos from their accounts in that calendar year; people then post the montage on their Instagram pages. In 2017 my top nine included five selfies, four more than in 2016; no selfies were in my top nine in 2015....

Q: I’m a 40-year-old guy with a 30-year-old girlfriend. We’ve been together a year, and I can see a future with her. But there are problems. This girl comes after two minutes of stimulation, be it manual, oral, or penile. As someone who takes pride in my foreplay/pussy-eating abilities, this is a bummer. She gets wet to the point where all friction is lost during PIV and my boners don’t last....

“Like everything in life, fat needs time to get better.” Now Publican Quality Meats butcher Rob Levitt is getting into it. Earlier this week he took possession of a carcass from a seven-year old Holstein dairy cow raised and milked on Michigan grass and procured by a fellow named Eric Shevchenko, who runs an operation called Old World Farms out of the Mitten with the aim of getting midwestern mature beef into the hands of chefs and butchers....

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....

Aimee Levitt An old-fashioned old-fashioned There’s no Henry at Henry’s Swing Club. The name comes from a 1947 John Lee Hooker song called “Boogie Chillen’” about a blues club in Detroit. The Henry there I imagine as a hepcat mixing drinks in his shirtsleeves for men in zoot suits and women in elaborate hats. You will not find any of these things at DMK Restaurants’s Henry’s Swing Club, a cavernous, garage-like space in River North where youthful investment banker types in ties play pool and clusters of young women in ponytails with expensive bags gather for postwork drinks....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, June 23, 2016. State budget impasse puts HIV testing at the Center on Halsted in jeopardy The seemingly never-ending Illinois budget impasse has been affecting nonprofits for months, and now it’s put free HIV testing at the Center on Halsted in jeopardy. The LGBTQ community center has been testing without funding for a year now, but it might not be able to continue much longer....

As Chief Keef’s “Faneto” gradually takes over hip-hop, more and more MCs flock to the song via new remixes—Chicagoan Katie Got Bandz is one of the many rappers who have added their voice to the mix in the past couple days. If you’ve spent any significant time listening to the booming track (or watched a large portion of the 62-minute “Faneto: The Movie”) it’d be good to play something else to cleanse your palette....

The view is divided by screens and mirrors in Jane Jerardi‘s delicate hold. Fragmentation by the frame creates incomplete views of arms and torsos, close and deliberate. You hear the squeak of the pencil, the rustle of paper—a voiceover, separated from the person dancing in the grass, says, “How can I expand my box?” Kato again, teaching a Muppet-esque puppet how to say “excuse me” in Japanese, Spence Warren speaking poetry on the street, a remarkably present duet with Nora Sharp bridging Brooklyn and Chicago at Links Hall’s 96 Hours Festival....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Chicago police might be equipped with anti-texting-and-driving device The Chicago Police Department might be the first in the U.S. ” to arm its police officers with devices that will tell them immediately if motorists were texting when they got into a traffic accident,” according to the Associated Press. The City Council’s public safety committee voted in favor of a CPD study on “Textalyzer” devices....

On Saturday, September 12, six days before London experimental-pop artist A.G. Cook released his album Apple, the founder of label and collective PC Music assembled more than 20 like-minded acts for a livestream festival called Appleville. Hosted by a custom website with an embedded Twitch stream, this self-described “tribute to live computer music” starred Cook, kaleidoscopic indie trio Kero Kero Bonito, bedroom-pop phenom Clairo, irreverent dance duo 100 Gecs, and bona fide pop star Charli XCX (who’d hired Cook to be her creative director in 2016)....