Chicago certainly has no shortage of celebrity chefs with growing restaurant empires. But most of them are busy colonizing the North Side. Here on the South Side, celebrity chef Tony Hu is starting to become a household name, at least in Chinatown, where he just opened his fifth restaurant, Lao You Ju Restaurant and Lounge.
Chinatown
Crayola Community
by Chelsea Leu •
As rain spat outside, Chinatown residents and other interested Chicagoans gathered in the cozy basement of the Chinese-American Museum for a simple purpose: to draw. As a part of The Big Draw Chicago, a month-long and city-wide festival, visitors were…
Chinatown
by Chicago Weekly Staff •
This year marks Chinatown’s centennial, an occasion that has the neighborhood awash in color and flush with pride. In 1912 Chicago’s Chinese-American population, almost 2,000 at the time, moved southward to its current location around the intersection of Cermak and…
Best of the South Side 2012
by Chicago Weekly Staff •
Chicago is a city that boasts, and this is our contribution. Our half of the city—the South Side—is many things, and in our annual Best Of issue, we haven’t tried to solve the riddle of what makes this place tick…
The People’s Spice
by Laurie Sartain •
The massive mural of Mao Zedong in Tony Hu’s new restaurant has raised a red flag for more than a few food critics. Lao Hunan is embellished with all the amusing touches of the Hunan province of China, including the face of its most prominent former resident, Chairman Mao.
Noble Lineage
by Chelsea Leu •
White Castle #16, at Wabash and Cermak, was built in 1929. Weathering the Depression and the eight decades that followed, the porcelain structure slowly lost its sheen. But in September, the site was deemed so important that the Commission on Chicago Landmarks awarded White Castle #16 the “2011 Chicago Landmark Award for Preservation Excellence.”
Chinatown
by Wenjia Zhao •
Bolstered by a second wave of immigration in the ’50s and ’60s, the area has developed two distinct sections. “Old Chinatown” runs down Wentworth Street, “New Chinatown” down Archer Avenue.
Contingency Plan
by Annie Pei •
That impulse to take a second look is at the heart of Joan Waltemath’s “Contingencies” exhibit. Contingency involves both the whimsies of chance and the connection between things.
