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We ask a lot of the diner, and all too often the diner disappoints. How can we expect the all-purpose concept—promising omnicompetence with regard to everything from French toast to Denver omelets to turkey wraps to chili—to execute any of it, beyond basics like eggs and toast, really well? I don’t know how Avondale’s Brother’s Restaurant does with any of that stuff, but I’ve heard good things about the turkey Reuben, the turkey-bacon club made with real turkey breast, and the ham-bacon-sausage Brother’s Skillet with crispy hash browns....

Courtesy the Raydios’ Facebook page The Raydios in late 2014. That’s Fink in the sunglasses. Twenty years ago I arrived at the conviction that the best punk band in the world came from Japan: Teengenerate broke up in 1996, just three years after their first seven-inch, but the one proper LP they released during that span, 1994’s Get Action!, still hasn’t been topped. I’m not referring to “punk” in the “bondage pants and great big pointy haircuts” sense, but rather to an in-the-red descendent of undomesticated 60s garage rock, rooted in the blues and fueled by the reckless energy of juvenile delinquents in hopped-up cars....

[Image-1] Old Irving Brewing Co. Mid-September [Image-5] Cofounders Dave Dahl and Kevin Lilly are longtime homebrewers and drinking buddies who made the leap to professional brewing through stints at Metropolitan and Five Rabbit, respectively. Along the way they discovered a shared love for Belgian-style and malt-forward beers—saisons, golden ales, scotch ales, stouts—which will be the focus at their Pilsen brewery and 2,000-square-foot taproom when it opens in late fall. a 2101 S....

This story was originally published by ProPublica Illinois. ProPublica Illinois is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. Sign up for The ProPublica Illinois newsletter for weekly updates. Leer en Español. The Trump administration is sending immigrant children who are alone, afraid and sick with fever, chicken pox and even tuberculosis to shelters in Chicago, where they are further isolated to prevent the spread of disease, according to one of the nonprofit organizations caring for them....

Roosevelt Myles, an inmate at Illinois River Correctional Center who has been waiting 20 years for a wrongful conviction hearing that was granted by the appellate court in 2000, has now earned enough “good time” sentencing credit to leave prison in August. Under different circumstances, for a man who has already spent 27 years behind bars for a murder he says he did not commit, waiting just a few more months to get to live with his fiancée and begin a career as a paralegal might have been tolerable....

Men. You can’t live with ’em, and you’ll want to stay out of range of ’em, too. And then there’s Ron, the neighbor from hell—an angry ex-marine with a dog that won’t shut up, a mailbox full of gun-and-ammo catalogs, and a penchant for playing Call of Duty REAL LOUD. Izzie finds him so intimidating that she wants to sell the condo and move. Unwilling to take a loss, however, Taylor tries to minimize Ron’s baleful influence over their lives....

Mustafa Ozer/Getty Images Let’s all get married! Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That unmarried Mama-Grizzly daughter Bristol Palin is pregnant? Again? —Tony Adler

I don’t watch a ton of television, but I reserve Sunday nights for unwinding and zoning out to just about anything. That’s my only excuse for following Entourage—Mark Wahlberg’s semiautobiographical sitcom about an A-list movie star and his three buddies—for its entire eight seasons, long after I’d stopped laughing at it and grown embarrassed by its puerile fantasy world of limitless wealth and models hastening to blow you. The series focused so much on sexual escapades, romantic relationships, and business maneuvers that you could never get a sense of the actual movies being made by toothsome lothario Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier)....

Burning sage. Healing sessions. Yoga classes. Filmmaker Caprice Williams admits that when she was a kid, she would have assumed that anyone who did these things was a total weirdo. Yet they’re practices that adult Caprice now preaches, ones that feature prominently in her new webseries Journey. In episode one, Magnolia (played by Williams) threatens to sage every part of her friend Gia (Antoinette Drummer). In episode two, Magnolia learns about the intuitive powers of tea....

In late August, a man was found unresponsive in his car outside the west side location of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, a local overdose prevention and harm reduction group, according to former employee Nikki Carter. Wilson, however, told the Reader in December through an attorney that she was “proud of how everyone on the team handled the situation in the neighborhood,” and said that the window was not broken out of fear the car would later be vandalized....

Q: Is it terrible to believe you can still have a truly monogamous and loving relationship with one partner after 20 years? Or can we walk into a relationship knowing that within those decades of being together that situations like infidelity or being attracted to another is completely unavoidable? And if we acknowledge that in some cases it’s truly unavoidable, should we mentally prepare ourselves for this possibility during our “monogamous” stage?...

Of all the east-coast bands that helped sharpen screamo into a definitive style in the late 90s, Connecticut three-piece Jeromes Dream have the most compelling mystique—especially for fans who never saw the band before they called it quits in 2001. During their four years together, Jeromes Dream dropped five split EPs and two brief, fiery albums, all seven of which were repackaged on the two-CD set Completed: 1997-2001 (Alone Records) in 2005....

Gossip Wolf got acquainted with local queer crooner Andrew Sa via his show-stealing turns with the Hideout’s hilarious and heartwarmingly campy Cosmic Country Showcase. At this recurring revue, aliens, monsters, and other oddballs display an uncanny talent for belting out country tunes—usually backed by a killer band with Sima Cunningham (Ohmme), Sullivan Davis, Dorian Gehring, Liam Kazar (Marrow), and Spencer Tweedy. On Sa’s new covers EP, Cosmic Country Stars: Andrew Sa, his high, keening voice is very much of this Earth, adding pathos and lovely loneliness to a sparkling version of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” and a plaintive duet with Kelly Hogan on Neko Case’s “I Wish I Was the Moon....

It’s a classic meet-cute: Jason Zenz and Andrea Martin met on Hinge in March 2020, against the backdrop of the onset of the global pandemic. OK, not quite classic, but a now common love story. While in pre-pandemic life, the two might have gone out for drinks or gotten dinner at a neighborhood spot, they had to adapt, as is the case for life under COVID-19. “I felt like I already knew him when I met him,” Martin says....

Is it possible Chicago has achieved peak gourmet doughnut saturation? A question like that implies that there is such a thing as too many doughnuts, which is simply not the case. (Except maybe during Donut Fest, when a visitor caught unprepared may attempt to eat a dozen in an hour.) Anyway, there are still many pockets of Chicago that have not yet been graced with a bakery that produces fresh doughnuts....

When it was party time in San Juan Pilcaya, Maria Moso was the village’s go-to for pipián verde. About two years ago, Maria, Anay, Daniel, and his stepfather Fernando started a small catering business, making quesadillas and pambazos on a parillada, a portable gas- powered grill. Pambazos, the guajillo-­drenched potato-and-chorizo sandwiches, are a specialty of Mexico City (where Fernando is from). The business flourished for over a year and half....

It’s not unusual to have your identity stolen on the Internet. What happened to Adam Busch is a little less common, a lot less sinister, and a bit more complicated. Busch, who moved to Chicago in 1999 from Saint Louis, lived here until 2014, and during those years he fronted two excellent bands, Manishevitz and Sonoi. Shortly before leaving for Austin, Texas, he made his first solo record, River of Bricks, with assistance from another former Chicagoan who’d headed south, Michael Krassner of the Boxhead Ensemble....

Like Hamilton cast members on Mike Pence, holiday shows are swarming Chicago­-area theaters. We review eight of them here, and there are more to come next week. —Tony Adler It’s a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicago A number of holiday favorites in Chicago have become tradition, families returning year after year for anodyne entertainment. This mainstay from American Blues Theater was new to me: a live radio-style version of Frank Capra’s beloved 1946 movie starring Jimmy Stewart....

By now we all know that just because you’re a quote-unquote adult doesn’t mean you actually know what you’re doing. There are always lessons to be learned from your own experiences, from friends and experts, and, in the case of Hello! It’s Hobert, from a DJ and a talking clam. Hello! It’s Hobert isn’t CAN TV’s usual fare. Thompson’s not sure how the folks who come to the channel to watch meetings with their alderman or religious programming will react to him singing about his prostate exam, but he worked to make the show as accessible as possible while hopefully introducing some of the best comedic talent in the city to a new audience....

According to “Food Truck Nation,” a study released today by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Chicago ranks 13th in the U.S. for friendliness to food trucks—behind Indianapolis, Raleigh, Nashville, and Saint Louis. Portland is first among the 20 cities analyzed, followed by Denver and Orlando. Bigger cities fall lower in the list, but LA and New York, in eighth and ninth place, still finish well ahead of Chicago. The full 64-page report includes a page of information for each of the cities included in the study....