Last January, Yah’s Cuisine became the second vegan restaurant specializing in soul food to open on 75th Street. Located roughly three miles from its well-established predecessor, Soul Vegetarian East, Yah’s may be signaling the setting of a delicious South Side standard. If that be the case, consider me satisfied. Read the rest of this entry »

Has ShoreBank changed the world? The original socially minded bank has changed lives, helped revitalize the South Shore neighborhood in which it was started, and rewritten the game of financial services. But the exaggerated impact of the financial crisis on the low- and moderate-income neighborhoods it serves proves its mission remains an apt one. Founded in 1973 as a new kind of bank, ShoreBank showed that financial institutions that were invested in community development could make a real profit while making their clients’ welfare its top priority. In the past few rough months, it has continued to innovate, adapting to suit the needs of communities that are hardest hit by the recession. But the bank itself looks forward to an uncertain future. Read the rest of this entry »

Senegalese musician Morikeba Kouyate sits in the sunny front window of Hyde Park’s Chant restaurant, his twenty one-stringed kora resting in his lap. He is taking a breather in between songs, which layer his high, strong voice over complex fingerwork on the gourd-and-stretched-skin instrument. In the expansive dining room, a few diners circle around the buffet table, where fresh fruit, French toast, and omelets-to-order are offered alongside Thai-style chicken and bottomless mimosas. It is the mid-afternoon, and the brunch rush has passed; Morikeba no longer has to compete with the clinking of silverware. Jazz and blues has, of course, a long and illustrious history on the South Side, and Chant’s musical brunches are well-attended, with outdoor tables crowding the sidewalk in warmer weather. But what do brunches with accompaniment say about Chicago’s jazz tradition today? Read the rest of this entry »

The South Shore Cultural Center lives a delightfully serendipitous existence of split artistic allegiance. On its west side, a bedlam of auto garages, chop suey joints, and conjoining railroad tracks perform an urban dance of crackling vitality. On its east side, swaying trees and rolling green grass intermingle with the soft sighs of Lake Michigan. The location is a juxtaposed oddity and confusion to the senses, but for the South Shore Opera Company of Chicago (SSOCC), this is home. Read the rest of this entry »

South of Hyde Park stretch two lakefront neighborhoods with very different histories. Woodlawn was once a prosperous neighborhood, helped along by the World’s Fair of 1893 and the El tracks that connected it to downtown. In the 1940s and ’50s, integration brought a sudden demographic shift, and after the 1968 riots that raged across the West Side, the remaining white-owned businesses decamped for the suburbs. The neighborhood’s further decline lead to a rash of insurance arsons in the ’70s and ’80s, and 63rd Street, once one of the city’s major retail corridors outside the Loop, became a patchwork of empty lots. Today it’s on an upwards trend, with new housing developments, University of Chicago campus buildings, and a new coffee lounge opening soon at 63rd and Woodlawn Avenue. Across 67th Street is South Shore, a middle-class neighborhood centered along 71st Street and blessed with two lakefront attractions, Rainbow Beach and the South Shore Cultural Center, a former country club bought by the Park District for public use. Read the rest of this entry »

Chef Efrain Cuevas started Clandestino about a year ago in order to provide a community-based, high-quality alternative to gourmet restaurant cuisine. The underground dining organization meets every few weeks to enjoy a themed menu, at a location that is disclosed only 48 hours before the actual event. This past weekend, Cuevas served five cheese-inspired courses to a crowd of 50 or so hungry guests in a beautiful multi-media exhibition space situated in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. Read the rest of this entry »

“This is the city that burned down,” Bill Kugelman says bluntly when asked about the importance of a Chicago fire museum. The former president of the Chicago Firemen’s Union sees little official recognition of fire history in a city famous for rising out of the ashes of the 1871 blaze. But that is about to change. In the next year, two museums dedicated to fire service, the Fire Museum of Greater Chicago and the Chicago Fire Department African-American Firefighter Museum, are scheduled to open on the South Side. Read the rest of this entry »

“In India, when a guest first enters your home, whether royal or beggars, it is custom for the host to offer tea,” says Ranjana Bhargava as she turns down the burner beneath the boiling pot of milk. Seven mugs stand adjacent to the stove, one for each student in tonight’s North Indian cooking class in Bhargava’s South Shore home. Bhargava, whose apron covers her traditional salwar kameez tunic, stands stove-side as she soaks several teabags into the milk, watching it rise and fall as though breathing. The kitchen walls are lined with wooden cabinets, some entirely filled with various kinds of lentils, others with enormous sacks of Indian spices. The weight of the long, narrow kitchen is centered on the island stove. As students arrive, each takes a seat around the island and Bhargava starts the class. She begins with spices: spices from every region ranging from cumin and turmeric to saffron and dried pomegranate seeds. “Every dish has to have something tart, something spicy, and something salty,” explains Bhargava. Bhargava, throughout her life in the kitchen, has written on every single Indian spice. “So many recipes use Indian spices, but people don’t know how to cook with them,” she explains. “I want to educate in order to help expand the knowledge of cooking.” Read the rest of this entry »