Time Out Chicago

• Restaurants & Bars

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  • Fancy, but no meat market

  • Karyn’s on Green

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  • Karyn Calabrese makes vegan food date-worthy.

• • Bhabi’s Kitchen

  • The foreclosure crisis threatens a beloved Indian restaurant.

  • The 2010 TOC Chili Cook-off champion

  • Our fifth annual Chili Cook-off at Martyr’s drew massive amounts of people…and pork.

  • Six restaurants that are bakeries, too.

  • Ba Le When the French controlled Vietnam, baguettes crossed cultures, and one of the finest results of this is the banh mi sandwich. They’re plentiful in this area, but this bakery creates most of the bread the restaurants use, so go try the source.

  • Leo’s Coney Island

  • The first Illinois outpost of the drool-inducing franchise known for all-day breakfasts, Greek specialties and Coney Island hot dogs

  • Soft serve

  • It’s not the most logical trend for winter—when snowy winds are stinging your face, who’s thinking about ice cream?—and yet ever since the holidays, soft serve has been at every turn.

• Music & Clubs

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  • Paspanga (Canteloupe)

  • Burkina Electric

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  • This Afro-pop electronic act plays Old Town School of Folk Music on Wednesday 16.

• • People Under the Stairs

  • For more than a decade, this L.A. duo has partied obliviously onward as if the Berlin Wall just fell.

  • Nneka at Double Door

  • Nneka Egbuna from Warri, Nigeria, plays her first Chicago show.

  • We grade the city's newest rock joints.

  • Can the beer industry please make a better low end?

  • Porn! Destruction! Opera?

  • With shocking videos and socialist texts, Opera Cabal smashes convention. And a few chairs.

  • Sade

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• Arts & entertainment

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  • Art review

  • “Production Site The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out”

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  • Museum of Contemporary Art, through May 30.

• • Gold standard

  • An Australian among us launches her award-winning novel.

  • Joffrey Ballet Cinderella

  • We’re at the Joffrey Tower in one of the company’s all-glass studios; our view is filled by the CHIC of the Chicago Theatre’s red-and-yellow marquee and one of Marina City’s corncobs.

  • Come on Charlyne

  • Stand-up Yi’s star climbs one nerdy step at a time.

  • Laura Letinsky

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  • The title of Laura Letinsky’s series “The Dog and the Wolf” evokes the space between civilization and the natural world.

  • Forest Gate

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  • By Peter Akinti. Free Press, $14.

• Theater

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  • Cadillac Palace Theatre

  • August Osage County

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  • Two-and-a-half years, five Tonys and one Pulitzer later, Tracy Letts’s sprawling, well-observed plains drama returns to the city that bore it.

• • The Old Settler

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  • The Brother/Sister Plays

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  • The course of massive young ambition doesn’t always run smooth in this sibling revelry.

  • Distracted

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  • Mama is having a bad day: Telemarketers tie up her phone, news is rife with disaster, and her kid won’t stop yelling.

  • The Emigrants

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  • The debut offering from Moving Stories deals, fittingly enough, with two new men in town.

  • Blue Door

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  • An African-American math professor endures a long, dark night of the soul following his wife’s request for a divorce.

The Get

• Shopping & Style

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  • Store explorer

  • Ray Yang at First Aid Comics

  • Hyde Park Art Center’s program director finds superheroes in Hyde Park.

• • P90X

  • I’m the first to admit that I’m a little late in joining the P90X party. In this fast-forwarding TiVo age, I’ve completely missed Tony Horton’s ubiquitous infomercials touting the fitness DVDs.

  • Clothes encounter

  • “Just about everything I’m wearing is from Aritzia in Water Tower. I like it there because it’s all about the look for a little less. This whole outfit, minus my Ash shoes, is under $450.

  • Game on

  • Cure your winter boredom with these new classic board games.

  • Lilium

  • After 36 years in the floral industry, Brian Braddy had more than enough know-how to open a flower shop.

  • Foodie's house

  • Blogger Tim Mazurek's Oak Park digs

• Film

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  • The Oscars

  • Crowded house

  • Does including ten nominees for the Best Picture Oscar matter? And will it attract new viewers?

• • Percy Jackson & the Olympians The Lightning Thief

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  • A mashup of the angsty adolescent intrigue of the Harry Potter films and Twilight’s teenybopper epics.

  • Saint John of Las Vegas

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  • A bottomless bucket of self-conscious indie quirk that stars the blameless Steve Buscemi as compulsive gambler John Alighieri, a supposedly broken man at the mercy of his lotto-card demons.

  • The Shock Doctrine

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  • The latest in a series of speaking tours repurposed as documentaries, the film attempts to cram Naomi Klein’s sprawling critique of “disaster capitalism” into film form.

  • Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vols. 1 & 2

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  • This two-volume collection of B movies includes eight films from the 1940s and ’50s, amply filled with images of a bygone age when broads wore tight sweaters over conical bras, all the cops were Irish and doctors smoked during tricky intestinal surgery.

  • Fish Tank

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  • Arnold introduces us to the truly awful life of 15-year-old Mia (Jarvis), who is navigating the dangerous transition from childhood to adulthood.

• Decade in review

• • Our dumb decade

  • R.I.P. to OMG and other aughties sayings or Aughtie 5000

  • They lived. Now let these sayings of the '00s die.

• • Underrated Chicago albums

  • The decade’s most overlooked gems.

  • The decade in food

  • These openings shook Chicago dining.

  • Most fashionable TV shows of the aughties

  • Reality TV, drama and nostalgia

  • Top ten stupidest Kanye West quotes

  • The hip-hop star’s dumbest moments

  • Most notable electronic subgenres to rise—and fall

  • 1. Nu-rave. 2. Two-step.