Tonight we'll find out if Stephanie Izard wins the title of "Top Chef" in part 2 of the season finale. Filmed in Puerto Rico last month, Izard pits her skills against progressive cuisine acolyte/fauxhawk wearing Atlantan Richard Blais and the mopey, attitude-filled Lisa Fernandes of New York. Lisa won no one over last week when, after the shocking elimination of Antonia Lofaso, she looked at her peers and said, "I know you're disappointed to see......

Just received notice from the folks behind that June 15 plate-to-plate competition between Stephanie Izard and Nick LaCasse at the Drawing Room at Le Passage. A second event — a VIP cocktail reception with the guest of honor — has been added for 9 p.m. that evening. The $40 per-person admission will include two complimentary seasonal cocktails created by Izard for the event. Furthermore, those who miss out on the dinner or reception can sample......

Who’s your daddy? Gary Iriza, Mr. Palm Springs Leather 2008, is your daddy, sir. Iriza took the leather sash at the XXX International Mr. Leather (IML) Competition Sunday night. (The XXX stands for 30th anniversary, people.) IML is a beauty pageant of sorts, celebrating masculinity and a lifestyle of leather. IML has its roots in the Mr. Gold Coast contest, held in the historic Gold Coast Leather Bar. It expanded to a larger venue in......

Stolpman is in Europe for the next two weeks (lucky), so I'll be handling the recap duties until she gets back. Fear not, dear readers, for those of you who'll miss her as much as I do right now, I have two words for you. Balloon knot. That's out of the way. Let's get to recapping. For some, the thought of Tom Coliccho sneaking into your home and waking you up may be unnerving. For......

We wrote in last week's power rankings that one of the things that keeps us coming back to Top Chef Chicago week after week is to finally see when Lisa will leave. That seemed imminent last week, after she landed in the bottom three in both the quickfire and elimination challenges. Then she threw Andrew under the bus, causing viewers to say "WTF?" We began to wonder what Lisa's doing to be one of......

We love American Idol, but not because we like hearing offbeat covers of Top 40 classics. If nothing else, when the audition episodes start airing in mid-January, we suddenly see the light at the end of the winter tunnel, knowing that by the time the confetti is falling around the next media-generated pop star, it will be summer! Chicago has a local, and more fabulous, version of our road-to-summer soundtrack. The Windy City Gay Idol......

Anytime an event is held every few years instead of annually, it takes on some added importance (we're thinking, for example, presidential elections, the Olympics and the World Cup). In the culinary world, this event is the Coupe De Monde De Boulangerie, a bread-baking contest that takes place every three years in Paris. This year, it's part of the Europain exhibition, held March 29–April 2. How it all goes down, via Slashfood: Started in......

Movie attendance is down 10% this year. Bad word of mouth when it comes to this year's mainstream releases perhaps? Moviemaking competitions are a great way to put our money where our mouths are, and here are some worth shooting for: -- In surely the first competition of its kind (outside of some obscure William Gibson story maybe), this January filmmakers will converge in Second Life for the 48 Hour Film Project. It's an abstract......

We took a break from our Dungeons and Dragons to check out the competitive gaming taking place at the Chicago Cultural Center this weekend, which played host to the 2007 U.S. Open. We’re not talking about tennis here. We’re talking about the Rubik’s Cube Championship, where the winner of the 3x3x3 Speed Solve gets an all-expense-paid trip to the 2007 World Rubik’s Cube Championship in Budapest. The competition was was sanctioned by the World Cube......

Memorial Day Weekend is under way, so pull out the grill, set up the yard games, and put on your leather. For 29 years now this Chicago weekend has been synonymous with International Mr. Leather—a leather beauty pageant, leather and fetish conference, adult superstore, and cocktail party rolled up into one giant event that attracted some 15,000 leather daddies, leather boys, leather mamas, and leather girls last year. (Folks, that’s an entire town of fetish......

If you're a writer, Thanksgiving weekend is always rife with material. In addition to amateur night at the bars on T-Day Eve (if you were brave enough to venture out), there are the usual family shenanigans on the day of, and a juicy Black Friday anecdote or two. What's more, the office Christmas party is approaching. If you're feeling starved for material around this time of the year, then you obviously aren't paying attention. Instead......

The Cut and Paste Design Competition is coming to Chicago this year. This battle rap of graphic design nerds launched in New York in 2005 and will be taking place at Crobar, 1543 N. Kingsbury, on November 4. Graphic artists are normally given weeks or months for one project, here they will be required to produce design in rounds of 15 minutes in front of a crowd. The winner will receive an Apple MacBook, along......

Torontoist immediately wins our heart by using the word "Jackass" in a headline. In fact, we love their use of it so much that we're going to use it as much as possible throughout this post. For example, it looks like there are Toronto-area jackasses besides those who misuse the sidewalk: look at the crap on sale on Toronto's craigslist. But it looks like Toronto doesn't contain the kind of jackasses who pee in public......

Yesterday at the Chicagoist offices, we were all worked up over this article by Jim DeRogatis of the Sun Times. It's always interesting when someone writes a piece denouncing the very thing that they do. It's along the lines of gossip columnists who complain that Paris Hilton is in the news too much in their own columns. If we were drunk, we'd get into the whole hit-driven economy of the entertainment industry, but we're tired......

Rachel Barton Pine is a violinist on a mission spread classical music. And she's doing it by going on rock stations and playing heavy metal songs on her Guarneri violin. Rachel grew up in a poor household in Irving Park/North Center. She first played the violin at age 3 and obsessed with it soon after, she began taking lessons with a rented violin. At 10 Rachel made her solo debut with the Chicago Symphony and......

» Chicago Mile By Mile, a photographic exploration of Chicago's street grid » The Sox get a new mascot, Southpaw » Pollution causes Chicago beach closings » Sox Pride, a new White Sox ad campaign, fuels the already red-hot Sox/Cubs rivalry » Milwaukee and Chicago continue to point fingers at each other over who is to blame for Lake Michigan pollution » Will "The Black Widow" win the World Pizza Eating Competition this weekend? »......

Cancel your lame-o barbeque plans for this weekend and get all bondaged up for the International Mr. Leather competition (not work-safe, though it depends where you work). Rock! Around 10,000 people attended last year’s celebration of all things leather, so this isn’t some under-the-radar sneaky party: this is a guh-guh-gigantic leatherfest. This year promises to be spectacular, especially now that chaps are making a comeback in the broader pop-culture circuit. But let’s not forget—this is......