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I approached Entente, a new “casual fine dining” restaurant from Arami owner Ty Fujimura, with a bit of trepidation. With a website featuring little more than an inscrutable, cursory menu, a reservation system that requires a credit card number, and $20-per-person penalty for no-shows, I worried it had a touch of the user-unfriendliness you might encounter trying to get a table at, say, Schwa. And that’s not just because Fujimura’s chef is Brian Fisher, a four-year veteran of that closet-size crucible of fuck-you fine dining....

Happy valentine’s Day! To celebrate our love for you, we got you a LOT of stories about aldermanic campaigns. Our election coverage has been so much fun that even our die-hard music staffers want in on it. Alongside Maya Dukmasova’s look at the 46th Ward, we’re excited to present Leor Galil’s look at the rapper-turned-socialist challenger to alderman Pat O’Connor in the 40th—plus a three-page comics journalism feature from Anya Davidson on what’s going down in the 25th Ward that isn’t an uncomfortable text message from Danny Solis....

The major-label music industry is doing its best to pretend the pandemic is over. Despite an accelerating death toll, high-profile artists and organizations have spent the last half of this long year bringing audiences into indoor venues for award shows (the AMAs), album-release parties (T.I.), and even full concerts (Trey Songz, Chase Rice, Great White). Muse had previously coordinated the Love & Nappyness Hair Care Drive during the 2019 holiday season, an effort he repeated this fall....

When your ragtag, noisy hardcore-meets-postpunk band has spent the better part of a decade as one of the most deservedly hyped rock groups in the world, which direction do you choose next? In the case of Copenhagen’s Iceage, you drop the aggression and gloom of your early work, start over, and create an art-punk masterpiece. On May’s Beyondless (Matador), Iceage lays out dense, layered tracks that pile crisscrossing guitars, horns, and strings on top of pushy, dark, knotty songs that highlight the group’s epic melodic sensibility....

Usually, the quaint shop at 5044 N. Clark buzzes with customers of all ages, genders, sexualities, and levels of experience, browsing the expansive selection of vibrators, dildos, lubricants, and more. Down to the details, like sex-positive artwork and a fascinating collection of antique toys, Early to Bed knows how to create a welcoming and accepting environment for any shopper that might wander in the door. Nowadays, staff members fill their days processing and shipping orders that come in online....

Nowadays, what, exactly, is underground? Early to Bed, a feminist sex shop based in Andersonville, has donated condoms and lube for the occasion. “We’re promoting safe sex at the drive-in,” says the festival’s executive producer Taila Howe. “So for anyone who doesn’t vibe with the movies. . . that is an option.” “I was really stoked with the way that the festival was panning out, and then. . . COVID,” says Howe....

In the last week, with the city and state flailing around in their twin oceans of debt and the future of our Paris on the Prairie looking particularly grim, two of Chicago’s most distinctive characters hosted sunny celebrations that were all about making things better through thoughtful redevelopment. This is the second Evanston home Pritzker has turned into a luxury B&B; its sister property, Stone Porch, two doors down at 300 Church Street, won a city preservation award last year....

“J,” a pastry chef who grew up in Kuala Lumpur, says that her husband “M,” a savory chef who grew up in Kane County, is making problems for other couples with his food. J comes from a food-obsessed family. Her father moved to Kuala Lumpur as a young man and found work selling Hainanese chicken rice at a kopitiam, one of the region’s ubiquitous coffee shops. He wooed her mother with extra chicken wings—her favorite part—whenever she came around....

There’s never much debate about whether or not a new Robyn album is a party—it’s rather about what kind of party it is. With her 2010 trio of Body Talk releases, the Swedish dance-pop phenomenon unleashed a rank of futuristic club bangers, several of which, including “Dancing on My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend,” are still rightfully queued up on TouchTunes jukeboxes as a way to boost bar vibes when bar vibes are badly in need of boosting....

Swedish trumpeter Goran Kajfes has been a notable presence on the Scandinavian scene for about 15 years, and while he’s a superb and highly skilled jazz improviser, most of his work has triumphantly existed in the cracks and crevices between genres. He’s probably best known for his key role in Oddjob, an amped-up quintet finding evermore possibilities in the electric music of Miles Davis. While Oddjob remains active—they’re currently at work on their seventh studio album—of late the trumpeter has been making a serious splash with a large band he calls the Subtropic Arkestra....

Jesús “Chuy” García had a good excuse for waving a broom onstage at his election-night party like he was a zealous White Sox fan celebrating a series sweep. It was meant to symbolize a sweep of the electoral kind. The mustachioed congressional candidate had easily won his primary, and his slate of young Latino candidates from the southwest side—Alma Anaya, Beatriz Frausto-Sandoval, and Aaron Ortiz (plus Cook County assessor candidate Fritz Kaegi)—all stood victorious on Tuesday....

It’s a struggle in the wake of the election to write about a new brewpub in a way that makes it seem like it matters. On the day after Trump’s victory, I found myself at a table with a few other despondents at Old Irving Brewery, trying to medicate the malignancy of the Orange Cancer with snifters of high-ABV Imperial Black Ale. The menu is executed by Merges lieutenant Michael Shrader, of the late Urban Union, who’s armed with the most current restaurant weaponry (aka a wood-fired oven)....

Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor Wussy The existence of this great Cincinnati band addresses an important question: What if Yo La Tengo sounded more like Archers of Loaf and Drive-By Truckers? I’m not sure Wussy have matched the galvanizing fuzziness of their first two albums, but 2011’s Strawberry comes close, and “Teenage Wasteland” (off last year’s Attica!) is the finest song they’ve ever cut. Rob Nicholas, singer-songwriter The Green Mill When’s the last time you went to the Green Mill?...

“Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.”—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket But unlike the sexually arid world of Letts’s troubled Weston clan, Colston’s play draws the same connections between spiritual and sexual freedom that Baldwin embodied in his work....

Don Bierman In a 1983 debate with Mayor Jane Byrne and Cook County state’s attorney Richard M. Daley, Harold Washington called attention to the enormous black unemployment rate in Chicago, a problem that continues more than 30 years later. Tonight at 7 PM, WTTW will televise the last of the three mayoral runoff debates between incumbent Rahm Emanuel and Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. The Tribune says moderator Phil Ponce should focus the debate on “the only question that matters”—how to fix the city’s finances....

America is a large, ethnically diverse region, and so is Asia, a fact that has always made the long-running Asian American Showcase an amorphous player among Chicago’s film festivals. The Showcase covers so many ethnicities that the only commonality is the friction between those cultures and the American melting pot, which gives the festival a thematic consistency many of its peers lack. Much of this year’s schedule, screening at Gene Siskel Film Center, consists of serious documentaries: Right Footed, about an armless Filipino-American who becomes a disability advocate; People Are the Sky, about a U....

Well, that was weird. And funny. And awesome. If anything let the air out of the set, it was the Danzig’s stage banter. He followed each song with a long, awkward pause while he obviously caught his breath into the microphone. And then his commentary rolled out. With just a few words, Danzig transformed his image from Prince of Darkness to Beavis and Butt-Head. My favorite quip was probably “I can’t hear shit up here....

The Purge: Election Year is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Billed as a dystopian thriller, it is in fact a naively hopeful, flag-waving piece of pro-American agitprop. Like The Purge (2013) and The Purge: Anarchy (2015), Election Day takes place in the near future after the economy has collapsed and a cabal of old white men called the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) has instituted an annual lawless free-for-all called the Purge to cleanse the country of undesirables and its own aggressive impulses....

Welcome to the Reader‘s briefing for Friday, January 26, 2018. City Hall agrees to comply with Department of Justice request for immigration documents The city of Chicago has agreed to hand over the immigration documents requested by the Department of Justice under threat of subpoena, according to the Sun-Times. “We have seen too many examples of the threat to public safety represented by jurisdictions that actively thwart the federal government’s immigration enforcement—enough is enough,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement....

Santina Croniser Canadian whiskies, awaiting tasting Canada has a reputation for producing light, smooth whiskies without much whisky flavor—which makes them popular among people who don’t particularly like whisky, and anathema to those who do. (Unlike the U.S., Canada, Scotland, and Japan spell “whisky” without the e.) That reputation isn’t entirely undeserved; for many years, the Canadian whiskies that were being exported to the U.S. were mostly along the lines of Seagram’s Seven, Canadian Club, and Canadian Mist—which are generally pretty tasteless—earning Canadian whisky the nickname “brown vodka....