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Although food pundits and prophets are busily proclaiming the demise of nouvelle cuisine and the return to favor of steaks, chops, hearty stews, and old-fashioned alliances of red meat, potatoes, and gravy, Anne Finance, owner/manager of N.E.W. Cuisine, is betting otherwise. This small bistrolike River North eatery emphasizes grains, vegetables, and fruit; the animal kingdom is represented only by fish–the finny variety, for shellfish, as well as mammals and fowl, have been banned to keep cholesterol down....

CHICAGO SINFONIETTA The Orchestra of Illinois was basically an effort on the part of the Lyric Opera Orchestra to extend its tiny season with symphonic programs. But little thought was given to filling programming voids left by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or to bringing in strong conductors with vision and imagination. The Sinfonietta decided from its inception in 1987 to try tapping a market that had never really been investigated by the CSO: the city’s many ethnic groups and novice concertgoers....

Harpist Snooky Pryor was among the coterie of musicians whose classics on small labels like Marvel, Old Swingmaster, and J.O.B. in the late 40s and early 50s helped define postwar Chicago blues. Their music–rough and raucous where others were becoming urbane, vibrant with country imagery and down-home phrases when artists like Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon were fusing traditional themes with hard-edged, big-city swagger–showed clearly the connection between southern tradition and the burgeoning urban style....

For many years, general perception held that the A.A.C.M.–the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the world-renowned musicians’ collective born in Chicago 25 years ago–was solely committed to avant garde shrieks and sirens of the most extreme nature. In 1990, it is just as common for A.A.C.M. listeners, as well as the musicians themselves, to acknowledge the historical precedents to today’s music and the important place of traditional considerations. But even in the A....

William Shakespeare would have felt right at home with Chicago politics. What followed the funeral of the late Mayor Washington, for instance, was a typically Shakespearean scenario, complete with crowd scenes, rival factions, and speeches of impassioned concern for the public welfare, resulting, finally, in a back-room deal made while most of the populace slept. Some of them might be surprised to know it, but local aldermen have consistently performed like Shakespearean characters....

“Make sure you smoke a fresh cigar,” advises the Cigar Association of America. “A simple test for determining the freshness of a cigar is to squeeze it gently while holding it to your ear. A fresh cigar will give a little and produce a rustling sound like a cool breeze passing over a lazy palm tree. If the cigar is too dry, however, it will sound brittle like the snap of dried twigs on a sun-scorched prairie....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom Valeo’s review of Chicago Cooperative Stage’s presentation Joe Momma! (Reader, 3-9-90) clearly reveals that he was either in remote suburbia or Bejezus Nebraska, but surely as hell not anywhere near an inner-city Chicago high school circa the time of Dr. King’s assassination. Well, I was, and contrary to Valeo’s assertion that playwright Ron Mark “gets tangled up in stereotypes, platitudes, wishful thinking, and gooey sentimentality,” Mr....

If the Kronos Quartet playing transcriptions of Monk or Bill Evans is your idea of string-quartet jazz, then you’re in for a big surprise with the Turtle Island String Quartet. Rather than simply transcribing jazz harmony and lyricism to the world of the string quartet, minus the rather obvious and distinctive element of rhythm, the Turtle Islanders are all accomplished jazz musicians who write their own tunes, arrangements, and improvisations. The result is not jazz-colored string-quartet music, but rather full-blown jazz rethought exclusively for, and performed by, a string quartet....

BARRYMORE! I can’t think of a better subject for a one-man show than John Barrymore. Brilliant, beautiful, flamboyant, haunted by personal demons of which alcoholism was only the most obvious, Barrymore led a life characterized by early success and premature dissipation. He enjoyed friendships with figures as colorful and diverse as W.C. Fields, Winston Churchill, Errol Flynn, Albert Einstein, and Krishnamurti; he suffered tortured relationships with his drunken, syphilitic, finally insane matinee-idol father and a drug- and sex-addicted daughter; he battled his way through a long series of tempestuous, sometimes ludicrous romances, marriages, and divorces....

BEYOND THERAPY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the fact that Christopher Durang has written only two plays that directly confront his Catholic upbringing–The Nature and Purpose of the Universe and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You–Durang will always be a Catholic writer. Or, more precisely, he will always be a lapsed-Catholic writer. Even those plays of his apparently least concerned with the Catholic church, like A History of the American Film, or the play currently under consideration, Beyond Therapy, contain the sort of conflicted feelings about authority figures and systems of belief, and the half-acknowledged yearning for a universe over which someone is watching and judging, that one would expect from a product of the Church....

In 1929, already celebrated for his satirical revues and smart plays, Noel Coward offered his first operetta to London audiences. It was a resounding hit. Neither cynical nor particularly witty, Bitter Sweet harks back to the gentler, more decorous days of Strauss’s Vienna, to the irony-ridden, sophisticated milieu of Die Fledermaus. Its story line is uncharacteristically conventional and sentimental for the author of Design for Living: a proper upper-crust English maiden (circa 1875) escapes an arranged marriage by running off with her music teacher to Vienna, then loses him in a duel with a wicked colonel....

Friday 24 The School of the Art Institute’s free weekend art classes start today at Navy Pier; every Saturday and Sunday through July 14 (except July 7), you can drop in for one of three afternoon sessions; today there’s watercolors, figure drawing, and printing in three separate classes given three times each–at noon, 1, and 2. (The printing class is taught by well-known printmaker Carlos Cortez.) As the summer goes on, there’ll be sessions on more complex stuff like mask making, basket weaving, and printmaking....

CAREENING IS A SKILL By 1987 the band had split up and Beau O’Reilly, the most actively creative member, had joined up with an actress named Jenny Magnus. Together they constructed the cabaret review, The Angles of Angst, the Omelettes of Experience, or It’s All the Same Fuckin’ Day, Man. The piece reflected nearly all the worst aspects of the incoherent-funny-noises-and-grotesque-postures school of performance art–except for a couple of sharp-edged musical numbers whose professionalism stood out like compass points amid the chaos....

It’s midnight on the northbound Howard el. Two boys riding together are sitting on separate seats. They’re 11 or 12 so it’s too late for them to be out, and they’re making the most of it, cracking jokes and sprawling across their seats. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The train fills up downtown–this is the cleaning ladies’ express–and some people have to stand. But no one tells the boys to move their feet....

A Eurasian tree sparrow has been coming to a feeder in the front yard of a house at 140th and Hoxie in south suburban Burnham. It began showing up regularly in mid-December, but its presence was not made known to the world until after the Calumet-Sand Ridge Christmas Count on New Year’s weekend. Like its familiar cousin, the Eurasian tree sparrow is an Old World bird whose natural range extends from Western Europe to Hong Kong....

THE LOVER With Jane March and Tony Leung. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet if films about the relationships between white women and black men touch a raw nerve, so do films dealing with relationships between white women and Asian men. But here the context shifts to the centuries-old power struggle between imperialists and the colonized. The vanquished Asians were supposed to be meek, obedient, and pitiable–unworthy of the society of whites....

James Brown, the Hardest Working Old Man in Show Business, still won’t quit until his audience is as wilted and battered as he is. His voice barks and croons as authoritatively as ever, he’s got a female dance line to take up the slack when he needs a breather, and his band–if not up to the level of the Maceo Parker/Fred Wesley-led aggregations of yore–still lives up to Brown’s unyielding standards: whatever they do, it’s got to be funky....

People shove their way through the doors of the Athenaeum Theater, removing scarves and stamping the snow from their feet. The lobby, drab and badly in need of painting, is filled with opera lovers in a mix of clothing styles, ranging from fur coats to pantsuits, from lettermen’s jackets to tuxes to an occasional tweed sport coat. No one seems eager to leave the lobby and go inside, but many turn to watch Alan Stone, artistic director of the Chicago Opera Theater, wend his way through the crowd, a cane on one arm and Ardis Krainik of the Lyric Opera on the other....

Those of us in the press love to say things like “Those of us in the press.” It makes us feel worthy and important and part of something. Ask those of us in the press–and that’s “press,” not “media,” the latter including the TV networks and their low-budget radio cousins–what the hell we’re about and most of us, after some languid, Front Page-ish cynicism, will eventually get around to a modest mumble about “giving the republic the information it needs to govern itself....

THE DEATH OF CARMEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem is, the Bussert-Borski Death of Carmen feels as recycled as its fliers. This is a solution to a marketing problem, not a work of art. And it seems so unnecessary: after all, there’s hardly much public hue and cry for a new version of Carmen, nor is there anything wrong with the old one....