Did we mention that we have a thing for cheese? Well we do, so we stopped by our favorite cheese shop, The Cheese Stands Alone, and asked the proprietor for another good recommendation. We played it pretty safe last time — owner Matt Parker suggested a cave-aged Gruyere for snacking. This time we were looking for something nice to offer up over the holidays, and Parker was happy to oblige. One of the shop’s recent... more ›

Chicagoist isn't one to brag, but we had a golden ticket to see Tom Waits last night at the Auditorium Theatre. While we were blubbering like a five-year-old on his first day in kindergarten as Waits sang an appropriately boozy rendition of "Tom Traubert's Blues", we wondered if we could name a beer that we wrote a review over a year ago "beer of the week." We decided, "Why not?" more ›

With apologies to Eric Zorn if it weren’t for Phil Rosenthal’s media columns and “The Boondocks” Chicagoist’s Bridgeport correspondent would have no concrete reasoning for actually reading the Tribune. However, when someone (um, Scott Smith) clues us to an article like this from Tuesday’s edition of the World’s Greatest Newspaper (an aside to Neil Steinberg: that’s the Tribune’s slogan) and asks us if we can work a local angle into this we’re happy to oblige,... more ›