We were grabbing a granola bar from the Walgreens by our office this morning and came across these amazing treats. It was then we realized that we've been so caught up in the Leap Year excitement that we nearly forgot that it's time to get excited about St. Patrick's Day. While most of our non-Irish friends celebrate this time of year by getting drunk on green beer and acting like idiots, we like to......

More fascinated by Kelis' milkshake than Daniel Plainview's? Is the only Oscar you'll watch living in a garbage can? Then this Sunday probably means nothing to you. You're burnt out on the "glitz" and "glamor" of the night, not to mention the drama surrounding that writers strike. Of course, it's never too early to make alternative plans! While all your friends and compulsive gamblers are setting up their Oscar pools and getting ready to check......

The listed events were chosen by the editors of Chicagoist and brought to you by the 2009 Toyota Corolla. Food/Drink: Get an early start to Valentine's Day with a champagne dinner at Café Matou this evening. Chef Charlie Socher will prepare a five-course dinner featuring dishes from the Champagne region, paired with Champagne wines selected by Wine Director James Rahn. 1846 N. Milwaukee, 7 p.m. Cost is $95 (all inclusive); RSVP at 773.384.8911. Art:......

As Chef Laurant Gras prepares for the spring opening of L.2O (in the former Ambria space), he's been giving frequent updates on the restaurant's blog. Chef Gras' most recent entry focuses on Kindai bluefin tuna, which will take up a prominent part of his menu. Chef Gras describes Kindai, which is hatched and grown in a university lab, as the "ultimate combination of sustainability and exquisite taste;" Gras claims that only two to three......

Here are some things going around town to make you consider giving the weather a big ol' raspberry. Internet: Still sad that Chciagocrime.org shut down? Interested in how do do your own Google maps mashup? Or do you just want to understand how hyperlocal mapping works? Then head to the Garland Room of the Chicago Cultural Center this evening at 6 p.m. where chicagocrime.org's Adrian Holovaty himself discusses how they work. Film: If John Sayles......

On a weekend where gratefulness is foremost on our minds, it’s unfortunate that crime keeps moving forward. We’ll lead off with one story for which we can be thankful is not all bad news:Remember Nicolas Orbovich, the concert violist whose 1892 instrument worth $100,000 was stolen from the back seat of his unlocked car in a Michigan City, Indiana, Wal-Mart parking lot? It’s been found, with the help of Lake Station, Indiana, pawn shop, Orbovich’s......

SFist witnessed a new apartment building tszuj the skyline with spectacular, gaudy turquoise aplomb, the (informal) renaming of the Mission/SOMA neighborhood border, the return of the Maltese Falcon, the Mayor Gavin Newsom mea culpa-ing over his Hawaiian getaway during the oil spill, and double-decker buses hitting the streets of San Francisco. Oh, and some baseball player named Barry Bonds is a liar whose pants, it seems, are totally on fire. LAist continues to cover the......

The cover story to today's Sun-Times food section deals with inexpensive substitutes for fancy kitchen tools that you can find at the hardware store, which is something we've been down with since we started using the kitchen for more than beer-pong and a mechanic's station for bike repair. We typically use paint brushes to marinade roasts and meats, to butter pastries and to clean out the coffee grinder. We also have a mini-propane torch for......

We hope some of you got a chance to go to something at the Chicago Book Festival last week, but if not, here’s your chance. Our take on the second week: Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s senior legal analyst, discusses and signs his newest book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, and maybe adds a few pointers for broke Chicagoists. Monday, Oct. 8, 6 p.m., Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State St., Cindy......

A few days ago we unwittingly created a monster when we expressed our frustration about having to wait to see the schedule for this year's Chicago International Film Festival, which runs October 4-17. Well, we finally have a copy of said schedule in our hot little hands. What follows is a very brief, cursory summary of what you can expect this year (the full schedule will be online within the next few days). Regardless of......

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and......

Thanks largely to the ubiquity of the Food Network, everyone dabbles a bit in gourmet these days. Even bars that one would think should only cater in standard pub grub are going out of their way and dressing up their burgers with buns and sides our grandparents wouldn't dream of when they were our age. We're not knocking it, mind you. We're just saying that sometimes we just want a burger to just be a......

Chicagoist isn't usually one to play the ponies, but then it's not every day that the horse racing world is focused on Chicago. On Saturday, Arlington Park will host the 25th Arlington Million, the largest annual stakes race in Illinois. Among the field is last year's winner, Tin Man, with 3-1 odds. The nine-year-old is looking to defend his title against this year's favorite, After Market. The favorite at 2-1 odds, After Market is trained......

Monday morning can usually suck it, but this morning we woke up to discover something that made it all seem OK; the next season of "Top Chef" will be filmed in Chicago! "We love moving the show from place to place; it gives it a completely different feel," Bravo executive Frances Berwick said in an interview after announcing the news at the annual Television Critics Association press tour in Beverly Hills. "Chicago is a hotbed......

One of the reasons we feel fortunate living on the south side is when we want to visit a nearby neighborhood, we can do so with relative ease via bicycle. We're a couple minutes away from Pilsen. Bronzeville is a few pedals from the house. Hyde Park is a quick ten minutes via the lakefront bike path. We've even found great West Indian cooking in Englewood en route to Beverly via Damen Avenue and......

The major stories this week are the opening of Crust, the continuing saga of David Hammond, bug eater, and how — if Hammond decides to head to Beverly in the near future — he might have a Tippi Hedren moment fighting with the seagulls who've been dining al fresco on cicadas. There are still plenty of events happening in the next seven days. Here are a few of note. - This weekend would be a......

Nike opened up a store on the South Side and people in the neighborhood are hoping others will too. Motorola is cutting 4,000 more jobs. 27 students died violent deaths this school year. What's grosser than gross? A former nurse's aide was sentenced for raping and impregnating a disabled nursing home resident who couldn't walk, talk or feed herself. He said he did it because he was bored. Tank Johnson binged on junk food......

Vegetarian Hot Dogs?...

Yawn. That’s our initial response to the free music at the Taste of Chicago this year. We know not every concert should cater to us alone, but should we suffer because of the need to cater to the balding, khaki-wearer’s bland taste in music? Thanks, XRT, for taking this to a new level of disinterest. Who’s having the BBQ? That’s where we’ll be instead of Grant Park. The Taste of Chicago has released the Fourth......

Our spring rush has netted a fresh new class of pledges for our interview beat: Keidra Chaney, a self-described pop-culture nut, joins us from Lincoln Square, by way of Englewood, West Pullman, and Wisconsin. When she's not interviewing people like the folks at the A+D Gallery for Chicagoist, she works at DePaul, and she freelances for magazines like Venus Zine, Bitch, Friction, and Colorlines. Karl Klockars is also a Chicagoland native, growing up in the......

The death of storytelling has been predicted at least since the dawn of the Industrial Age. And in 1936, philosopher Walter Benjamin declared, "the art of storytelling is reaching its end." It's nonsense, of course; even if storytelling itself has taken on some "new" forms, it's still as prevalent as ever, perhaps even more so with the rise of the blogosphere and the millions of people unfurling their own personal narratives. Even after a hundred......

There isn't much more we can say about the South Side Irish parade, which rolls out en masse along South Western this Sunday. We know that for some of you it'll be your first — and possibly only — time heading out south to Beverly. We just want to assure you that you needn't be afraid. A dollar is still a dollar, Miller Lite dyed green is still Miller Lite, and there will be more......

Because of the weather it's a little hard for it sink in: spring is coming. And with spring (for us, anyway) comes an overwhelming wanderlust, not just the desire to get out of our coats and gloves but also to see somewhere new. While you could be a bachelor in Paris or take a romantic snorkel for two someplace, you could just as easily stay in town and still see 24 countries that span Europe.......

Spring appears to have, er, sprung, at least temporarily, in most of the Ist-A-Verse, so naturally, we're all feeling pretty good. (Yes, we know that spring doesn't officially start till later this month. Just let us enjoy our weather!) And that makes us that much more eager to share all of the nifty things we're up to... Over at Sampaist, spring has more than sprung: it's sweltering! But, as everyone knows, museums are an ideal......

Another weekend, another chance to get into trouble: For the third week in a row on the Blotter, multiple teens died in a car crash this weekend. Nine young people, ages 14 through 23, packed themselves into a four-door sedan in Oswego early Sunday morning. The driver and only non-teen, 23-year-old Sandra Vasquez, slammed into a utility pole, killing four passengers and injuring the rest. Vasquez has been charged with driving under the influence. The......

We here at Chicagoist love good ideas. We’re so joyful when a simple idea benefits almost everyone, and even more joyful when that good idea benefits historic architecture. The Columbian Exposition of 1893 is probably our most famous world’s fair, but in 1933 Chicago hosted the Century of Progress World's Fair. The fair celebrated design and technology, emphasized by its many streamlined Art Deco buildings. One of the finer points of the 1933 World’s Fair......

If you need further holiday gift recommendations after perusing our infamous Gift Guide, no one is a better authority on what your friends and family will like than a good old-fashioned stereotype. eBay Express, the fixed-price arm of the auctioning website, recently asked for wish lists from "iconic Americans" across the country, aiming to provide "a deeper look at what Americans really want for the holidays." Some of the iconic Americans on the list include......

Remember all those articles from several years ago about women who were “doing it all”? Bringing home the bacon and frying it up for hubby and the babes? In actuality, fewer mothers of young children are working, according to a new study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed an 8 percent drop in work-force participation rates of married mothers of infants from 1997 to 2001, from 59 percent to 51 percent. If you’re......

Oh blue bags, how we will miss mocking your irrelevance in the world of recycling. After a successful test of the 96-gallon blue carts in the Beverly neighborhood, the city will be tilting the carts onto their back wheels and rolling them to 7 wards throughout the city. The Chicago Center for Green Technology, which announced the pilot program, also indicated the city will open 15 drop-off locations for residents in other areas to take......