Having tasted the Holy Grail of coffee in October, we were curious to see how some also-rans fared, in comparison. By chance we came across a second place winner from last year's Nicaragua Cup of Excellence while making our monthly bean run at our local coffee shop. Lot #2 from Donaldo Vanegas Cruz's La Unión Estate sold at the competition's auction for $8.15 per pound, which was one-sixth the price of the winning lot.......

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......

In case some of you may have forgotten, that's Emmy in the picture. Depending on the time of day she's the smartest mammal in our household. She's unusually happy today, because yesterday the City Council inched closer to allowing her the right to join us for meals at outdoor cafés, a notion that flies in the face of common sense, sanitary concerns, arguments posited by a former alderman and the director of food protection for......

Got any plans for August 19? If not, you should consider brunch at Manny's Coffee Shop and Deli. Not only would you get the opportunity to munch on classic deli faves like lox and bagels, noodle kugel, corned beef sandwiches, pastrami sandwiches, and potato pancakes (not to mention salads, eggs and desserts), but you would also be supporting a good cause. Bright Pink is an organization dedicated to educating and supporting women who have a......

From a mom’s perspective, the concept of Ethel’s on Southport is brilliant: part cafe, part lounge, it’s a fantastic place to catch up with friends… and to bring your kids. Ethel’s award winning chocolate is reason enough to frequent this location (although some might disagree). They offer a stunning variety of funky flavors from a fruity cosmopolitan to a jasmine green tea ganache and all of your favorites in between: peanut butter cups, dark chocolate......

Chicago blogs were all abuzz last week with news about recently-opened East Village coffee shop bLENd. The simplest version of the story (as we read on The Food Chain) is that bLENd is owned by a founder of the abstinence-only education group Project Reality. We thought this was pretty interesting on a number of levels (not insignificantly the amount of media it has received) so we decided to get in touch with bLENd part-owner and......

Chicagoist wants you all to go to this story and look at the expression on CTA Board President Carole Brown's face as she rides a bus this February. Classic. The picture accompanies an article detailing Brown's plan to have the CTA's Office of Inspector General do an audit to see if buses and trains are cleaned as often and thoroughly as they should be. At a board meeting Wednesday, Brown was given the party line......

Fon is a community WiFi provider whose goal is to create a worldwide network of wireless users who agree to share their broadband connections with others who do the same. This might sound like a pipe dream, but they've gained enough traction to score backing from Google and Skype. Their latest project is to bribe people who live near Starbucks (or any other cafe, they say) to join their network and offer a cheap WiFi......

We'd like to start this week's run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur,......

We stopped by Stubbs, our neighborhood’s new coffee shop, the other night and inquired about its name. Along with some damn good Fratelli coffee and a nice salami/provolone panini, we left Stubbs that evening with some literary insight that had slipped by us in high school. Pierce Schmidt, Stubbs co-owner, told us that in Moby Dick, Starbuck was Ahab’s first mate on the Pequod and Stubb was the second mate. After we visited CliffsNotes......

With a Starbucks on every corner –- and 40,000 stores planned for the upcoming years -- it can seem like the coffee giant is the only place to get coffee. Those in the know, however, know that Chicago is home to a bevy of coffee houses, in the Loop and all around the city. November's Chicago Magazine tackles the age-old question: Who has the best cup of coffee in the Loop? In a not-at-all shocking......

Gather 'round the coffee pot, kids! It's storytime. Did you know that, in their ongoing quest to take McDonalds' "billions and billions served" philosophy to sickening new lows, Starbucks plans on opening another 250 stores in the greater Chicago area within the next five years? Did you know that a dozen of those stores are going to be downtown? That's nice for all those people commuting downtown to work, especially suburbanites, since two-thirds of Starbucks'......

We here at Chicagoist Towers confess that we are occasionally music snobs, and that this rampant snobbery can allow the occasional gem to slip undiscovered under our very noses. For years we have avoided The Katie Todd Band for a number of reasons. She was often paired with bands we considered only fit for the Cubby Bear circuit or (even worse, shudder) the suburbs. In our defense, we do remember being pretty drunk at Double......

Chicago's chief technology officer announced yesterday that the city will seek bids from technology vendors for building out a city-wide wireless internet network, or "Wi-Fi," as the kids call it. The network would compete directly with cable, DSL, and cell phone based ISPs, who, if Chicagoist's personal experience is indicative of everyone else's, tend to take their customers for granted. A vendor-backed service would be similar to what Google has proposed in San Francisco, where......

There are two ways to determine which posts were the most popular posts on Chicagoist this year: comments and hits. A lot of commenting tells us you've got feedback, you want to talk about things. Either the subject of the post or the way the post was written has struck a cord. A lot of hits means that even though you may not have commented on a post a lot, you went back and read......

Fast-food lovers, architecture buffs and the morbidly obese are hotly anticipating this Friday's opening of downtown's soon-to-be-favorite McDonald's location. The new store, which occupies the site of the mysteriously popular "Rock 'n' Roll McDonald's," is a double-decker, glass-enclosed "flagship" store that will seat more than three times the capacity of a normal Mickey-D's location and, like its predecessor, stay open 24 hours a day. Extended hours and greasy fries aside, the new building boasts a......

It’s cold out. The kind of cold that makes us want to escape the indoors and head to…a different indoors. Yes, we are talking about the can’t-take-the-mess (or my roommate) any-longer-must-go-to-coffee-shop blues. When the Cabin Fever hits us hard we tend to head to Andersonville where, until last June, the clear front-runner of coffee shop choices was Café Boost at 5400 N. Clark – an independent, friendly, plant-filled joint with a light soup and sandwich......