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  • A Son for a Son: The ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Power Rankings

    A Son for a Son: The ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Power Rankings

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    House of the Dragon is back, and the Dance of the Dragons is underway. The Targaryen war of succession will come down to control—who can control their impulses, their sycophants, and, yes, their dragons. With each passing episode, The Ringer will examine how Westeros’s key players are aligning their pieces on the board. As the saying goes, chaos can be a ladder. Welcome to the House of the Dragon power rankings.

    1. Cregan Stark

    In the opening scene of Season 2 of House of the Dragon, Cregan Stark—a.k.a. the Wolf of the North, a.k.a. the ancestor of the Starkfam we know and love from Game of Thrones—immediately comes across as the most righteous dude in all the Seven Kingdoms. Hosting disputed prince Jacaerys Velaryon at the Wall, Cregan shows him around with all the pride and extreme patience of a college senior giving a pre-frosh and their parents a campus tour: Here’s the bazillion-foot-tall elevator built by my ancestors, and over that way is basically death’s door; yes, we believe in single-sex education at this institution, our motto is “Duty Is Sacrifice,” and did you know that our admissions rate is a steady 10 percent?

    After all that, Cregan also makes sure to educate the naive, young Jace about the ways of the world. “Do you think my ancestors built a 700-foot wall of ice to keep out snow and savages?” he asks, explaining that the Wall also fortifies Westeros against that oldest and wiliest of foes, Death. (These taciturnt Starks sure love to bring everything back to first principles.) He remarks that, as legend has it, Jace’s Targaryen forebears once showed up flaunting their dragons—and that the mighty beasts, for all their fire-breathing power, instinctively knew not to cross the Wall. And, crucially, Cregan agrees to uphold his family’s old oath to Rhaenyra—but stresses that it’s super not his top priority right now and that the best he can do is send the “thousands of graybeards who’ve already seen too many winters,” take them or leave them.

    As the Targaryens continue to bicker about who gets to sit the Iron Throne, Cregan, quite simply, just rules. Sadly, though, like all the best sigma males, the Wolf of the North will be leaving everyone wanting more. According to showrunner Ryan Condal, we’re not likely to see Cregan Stark again until some future season. Terrible news for viewers, but if the good, cold lord has taught us anything, it’s that “this is not a sentence—but an honor.” I bend the knee.

    2. Larys Strong

    The total opposite of Cregan Stark in so many ways! Far from being motivated by pure familial loyalty, Larys is a dirty double kinslayer. Rather than viewing King’s Landing squabbles as distractions from a broader existential crisis, Larys’s entire existence is defined by the subtle art of the throne room scheme. Whereas Cregan speaks plainly, Larys prefers to insinuate and suggest … like when he murmurs to the Dowager Queen Alicent that he knows she was “indisposed” recently. (By “indisposed,” he means that she was Ser on Criston till she Cole.) And instead of defending against Death, he orders it up: In the Season 2 premiere, we learn that Larys, seeking to root out disloyal servants, has taken the liberty of ousting members of Alicent’s previous castle staff. (By “ousting,” I mean, in his words, that “they no longer breathe our air.”)

    Still, while he may be a weird dude through and through, Larys’s lurker shtick does seem to be working. He has long had a certain podiatryst arrangement with Alicent (sorry), but now that he’s personally handpicked all her maidservants, he doesn’t even need to be in the room to make her feel vulnerable and violated and claustrophobic and in need of a good scrub-a-dub-dub. That’s quite some power to wield over the mother of the king! And speaking of the king, Larys is getting in Aegon’s head, too: “Otto Hightower was your father’s hand, your grace,” he tells the young monarch, ostensibly laying the foundation for a Small Council shake-up.

    It can be hard out there for Larys types: In Game of Thrones, both Littlefinger and Varys, two elite-level manipulators, eventually made one too many chess moves and met their respective dooms. But for now, Larys appears poised to take a big leap: from Alicent’s wanker footman to, potentially, the hand of the king.

    3. The Crime Cloak

    Need to stay anonymous in some seedy crowd but don’t feel like hiding even an inch of your face? In the mood to conspire on, commit, or conceal any number of crimes? Look no further than the humble cloak, the hottest garment in Westeros.

    Are you someone nicknamed “the White Worm”? Perhaps you’d like this version, which resembles crushed silk. Need to easily reach your various swords and jacket buckles? This one gives Aemond great placket access when he’s on a mission! Rhaenys rocked the cloak when she escaped the castle ahead of Aegon’s coronation, and so did Otto Hightower when he made a business proposition to the White Worm herself. But the GOAT cloaker remains Daemon Targaryen, who really is a man for all seasons. His collection includes a bulky overcloak (worn for the occasion of killing his pesky first wife) and a cloak with lovely trim (his boatwear). He has even sported (while in the midst of grooming his teen niece and future bride) a sort of Flea Bottom version of the Investment Banker Patagonia: a cloak that kind of looks like a vest, worn over a white collared shirt.

    With a lewk that is part collegiate swim team parka and part Dark Kermit, and with a hood that somehow never gets blown off by a breeze and ruins the whole disguise, the Crime Cloak comes with all sorts of options to fit one’s sinister style—all while you’re blending in, lying low, and/or planning the murder of an heir to the Iron Throne.

    4. The Power Couple (Corlys and Rhaenys Velaryon)

    The Sea Snake and his dragonriding bride may not be the most powerful people in the realm, but as Season 2 begins, they are each in possession of a tremendous amount of leverage. Consider:

    • Corlys is effectively and operationally in charge of what is currently Team Black’s most successful tactic: a blockade of shipping lanes in the Stepstones that “has placed King’s Landing under strain,” according to Otto Hightower. While that hasn’t necessarily been easy to maintain—Corlys mentions a pressing need for more ships—it’s nevertheless a solid head start until Team Green can find a way to bolster its Lannister and Hightower navies.
    • Rhaenys and her dragon, Meleys, are essential to this effort: “I alone patrol over a hundred miles of open sea, endlessly, to hold the blockade,” she tells Daemon.
    • Rhaenys and Meleys are also essential to another effort, Daemon says: “With my dragon and yours together, we can kill Vhagar and her rider.” (That rider being Aemond Targaryen.) When Rhaenys demurs, Daemon tries to insist: “Fly with me. It is a command.” But the Queen Who Never Was always knows what’s what. “Would that you were the king,” she deadpans back. Daemon is many things, but he isn’t the boss of her.
    • Both Corlys and Rhaenys are cooperating with Rhaenyra and Daemon despite having many, many excellent reasons not to. Like the fact that their only two children both married Targaryens and both (to their knowledge, at least) wound up dead, conveniently enabling Rhaenyra and Daemon to wed each other. (That said, I do sometimes wonder whether Rhaenys secretly knows that Leanor lives!) Or the fact that Daemon killed Corlys’s brother, Vaemond, for speaking the truth.

    For now, it behooves the Velaryons to align with Team Black. But if that personal calculus changes even a little, suddenly everything from sky to sea becomes a whole different equation altogether.

    5. The Royal Couple (King Aegon II and Queen Helaena)

    This brother-sister, husband-wife, dalliant-dreamer, king-queen duo has always been a bizarre couple, and not just because of the whole inbreeding thing. “The queen is an enduring mystery, is she not?” says Aegon early in the Season 2 premiere, having just heard Helaena anxiously whisper something about being scared of rats. Indeed, going into this episode and this season, one thing that most excited me was finding out more about this wedded set of sibs. Like, do they have any common interests? What do they possibly talk about?!

    In the wake of “A Son for a Son,” I now have my answer: It’s safe to say that they’re about to share the common interest of “avenging the gruesome murder of our sweet, dead, 6-year-old, heir-to-the-throne child.” (Aegon doesn’t know about it yet as the episode ends, but he obviously will soon.) This is a potent motivation—particularly when it comes to Aegon and Helaena, both of whom are powerful people.

    One of them, of course, is king, and not just any king: He’s (a) a young king who is (b) eager to prove himself and (c) soon to be grieving his fine boy and, oh yeah, (d) was already close to shaking up the ranks of his nearest advisers. In other words, there’s really no telling what he might do next, only that it will be something drastic. And then there’s Helaena, who has consistently, if cryptically, predicted the future. If she can start harnessing her soothsaying into more actionable thoughts and ideas, she could have a weapon as vital as any flying dragon.

    6. Aemond Targaryen

    Speaking of flying dragons: Aemond’s mount, Vhagar, remains Team Green’s best weapon by far at the moment. Yet: “You do not have a seat at this council,” snaps Otto Hightower to Aemond when the latter enters the Small Council room in the midst of a meeting. But Otto’s boss begs to differ: “Aemond is my closest blood and our best sword,” says King Aegon II. “I welcome him.” Aemond may be in his mother’s doghouse for that minor mistake of accidentally killing his nephew, but in the Season 2 premiere, he demonstrated that he’s more than ready for the warfare to escalate further.

    “My brother is hostage to my grandsire and mother,” Aemond complains to Criston Cole as they plot paths to victory, “and they tell him that a war of dragons can yet be avoided.” Not anymore, needless to say—which means that Aemond is almost certainly about to take flight.


    7. Daemon Targaryen

    As Aemond positions himself to become the new Daemon, this week’s episode sort of made Daemon out to be the new Aemond: Daemon took his zest for vengeance a little too far, then everything got out of hand, now a boy is dead and war is coming, and probably thar be dragons. He has simultaneously made the world chillingly simple—tit for tat, a son for a son, repeat as often as necessary—while also complicating everything. And the scariest part, as ever, is that he’s probably pretty OK with all that he’s done.

    8. Rhaenyra Targaryen

    The queen in exile had only one line this episode, but it was a doozy: “I want Aemond Targaryen.” Those four words were all it took to set off the Rube Goldberg contraption of events that culminated in another dead kid. The good news: That’s some power right there! The bad news: Aemond Targaryen still lives.

    9. Jacaerys Velaryon

    Jace’s diplomatic visit to the Wall was a definite success. And the guy also appears to have some semblance of a moral compass, the likes of which we don’t typically see in the halls of power south of Winterfell. But that makes me nervous for him! If we’ve learned anything from Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon thus far, it’s that Westeros has a way of punishing intrinsic goodness and curdling warm hearts.

    10. Mysaria the White Worm

    Tired: Constantly dealing with Daemon’s bullshit.

    Wired: Saying what the hell, selling secrets to Otto, and then spitting at Daemon: “You only blame me because your true enemies are out of reach.”

    Inspired: Sure, Daemon may have imprisoned Mysaria, but this is the White Worm we’re talking about; this woman downright thrives in shitty situations. I completely expect her to emerge from captivity with a whole new cadre of associates and operatives.

    11. Alyn of Hull

    “They tell me that you are the one that dragged my body out of the sea,” Corlys Velaryon says to Alyn of Hull—a newly introduced, seemingly humble boatsman down at the Driftmark docks—in the season premiere. “I am indebted to you, Alyn,” the Sea Snake adds. Not a bad House of the Dragon character debut! Something tells me this won’t be the last we see of Alyn, who also mentions having a brother … a note that seems to pique Corlys’s interest. This situation is developing …

    12. Otto Hightower

    You know what, in a sick way, I almost felt bad for Otto this episode! He may be a self-involved prick, but the guy couldn’t catch a break. What’s worse: clocking your daughter and her favorite knight basking in clear post-hookup bliss, or discovering your grandson and that same knight discussing battle plans without you? Getting undermined by an amateur king who knows nothing about anything, or being plotted against by a slimy would-be usurper who knows way too much? Otto is a survivor indeed, but even cockroaches know that sometimes the only way to endure is to scatter and hide.

    13. The Smallfolk

    When it comes to lobbying powerful people to make decisions that benefit special interest groups, King’s Landing is a lot like New York City. You have Hugh the scorpion builder guy asking for, and being granted, better benefits for him and his fellow anti-dragon arms manufacturers, like he’s the NYPD getting funding for a bunch of new drones or surveillance vans or something. And then you have poor Jerard the Shepherd, whose simple ask—that the crown return his tithe of livestock so that he can make it through the winter!—is initially granted by Aegon the Magnanimous … only for the young ruler to get an earful from Otto and totally renege on the deal, Kathy Hochul style. Canceling congestion pricing, it turns out, is the feeding sheep to dragons of our time. Sounds about right.

    14. That One Couple (Dowager Queen Alicent and Ser Criston Cole)

    We’ve all known that one horned-up secret couple that thinks they’re being all sly and surreptitious with their dalliances but are actually hooking up all over creation and fooling absolutely no one. Typically, this happens during, like, adolescence. But in the case of House of the Dragon—where very few people have developmentally normal upbringings—it’s the Dowager Queen GILF and her Kingsguardsman who have apparently taken to christening every damn room in the palace.

    For Alicent, who spent years married to a decaying, old King Viserys and now serves at the pleasure of her firstborn failson, King Aegon II, all this carrying on seems to be a way to reclaim both her lost youth and her feeling of power. For Ser Criston, it’s maybe a bit more complex. Once upon a time, he raged at a young Rhaenyra for even suggesting a sworn-guard-with-benefits situation, but now that’s what he basically has with Alicent. It’s a direct and dishonorable flouting of his Kingsguard oaths, yet it also helps keep Criston in the room where it happens.

    This is all fun and games until someone loses a head. (An eye is so Season 1.) Alicent has for years sought to avoid a truly violent conflict, but it now seems like her window of time to achieve peace has slammed shut. And even outside the Small Council, her image as a doting mother is in shambles. It’s bad enough that Alicent and Criston were indisposed while two assassins breached a royal bedroom and killed a child in front of his mother. But then Helaena walks in on her mom mid-bone? That’s the stuff of nightmares, whether you’re a dreamer or not. I expect to see Helaena posting on the r/raisedbynarcissists subreddit before long.


    15. Blood and Cheese

    While Alicent is banging away, the rats will play! And for a moment, this bumbling pair of Hightower-hating, Harry-’n’-Lloyd-coded creeps seems like they might be the most powerful henchmen in the land. First, they pocket the initial half of that sweet, sweet bounty money. Then they sidle straight through the throne room in plain sight, working the “walk with purpose and act like you’re meant to be there” Super Bowl scammer strategy to perfection. And before long, they find themselves with the future of the realm literally right there in their grasp.

    But then they go ahead and destroy all these Ws by completing the job that Daemon contracted them to do. Well, sort of: Unable to locate their primary target, the eminently recognizable and full-grown Aemond, they settle for the next (and worst) option: cherubic 6-year-old Jaehaerys, son of Aegon and his sister-wife, Helaena. “A son for a son,” Blood and Cheese explain to a shell-shocked Helaena, making it pretty obvious who probably sent them—and ultimately removing any remaining leverage or value they may have had.

    16. The Next Generation

    If you’re a youngish Targaryen or Velaryon or Hightower who thinks you have your whole life ahead of you: You probably don’t!!! While “generation” has a way of losing all meaning in the context of the incestuous Targaryen family tree, it doesn’t really matter in this case who is an uncle-husband or who is a daughter-niece: Anyone young enough to have any future at all is highly vulnerable at present, and the horrors only seem to be escalating.

    One day you’re monkeying around in a dragon’s cave with your cousins and/or uncles; the next, you’re getting chomped by Vhagar. One minute you’re playing with attendance balls and being promised human horseback rides; the next, you’re missing a head. RIP, little Jaeharys! I’m bummed we won’t get to see what would have happened when you inevitably reproduced with your nearly identical twin sister a decade hence.

    17. Tyland Lannister

    Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold.

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    Katie Baker

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  • A New Bucktown Cocktail Bar Makes Magical Malort Shots and More

    A New Bucktown Cocktail Bar Makes Magical Malort Shots and More

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    Authentic dive bars, not merely the spaces that have adopted the aesthetic — those pretenders are filled with vintage neon signs and serve marked-up cans of domestic beer — are plentiful in Chicago. There’s a dedicated cohort of independent tavern owners who take pride in keeping these shot and beer spots alive.

    On the other hand, the city’s cocktail bars have been dominated by larger hospitality groups. While customers can see semblances of DIY culture in many of those bars, some can be more glitz than substance. In recent times, Chicago’s bar scene has experienced a revolution, with taverns like Lemon and West Town and Moonflower in Portage Park showing drinkers that not all independents need to have sticky floors like a dive.

    A case in point is Truce, an intimate drinking den that debuted before Memorial Day at 1935 N. Damen Avenue in Bucktown. The opening was pushed back a few times, but the final product is worth it. Stepping into the narrow space along Damen Avenue visitors will find a unique warmth rarely seen at a bar open for only a few weeks. The staff is friendly, the menu offers many options without feeling like a dense atlas, and nothing feels out of place — including the customers; there’s a welcoming and accepting vibe.

    Two couples run and own the spot: David Mor and Matthew Hunnel, plus Rami Ezzat and Sarah Kmiec. Their hospitality experience runs the gamut, including from Robert et Fils, Bavette’s, and Cindy’s.

    Mor is behind the drink list. He’s associated with Zubair Mohajir, the chef behind the casual Lilac Tiger and the Indian tasting menu restaurant the Coach House, both in Wicker Park. Mor is also a partner in Mohajir’s upcoming Mexican-Indian restaurant, Mirra — opening this summer around the corner from Truce. He’s using Mohajir’s masala chai recipe in his triple chai daiquiri, a viscous concoction made with Mount Gay rum. Mor put serious thought to the fancy drinks on the menu, but his bartenders quietly suggest more folks drink the simple strawberry vermouth and sparkling water. Truce celebrates various cocktail cultures, including Chicago’s. That explains a shot — RBF, which is made with cacao, Aperol, lemon, and Jeppson’s Malört. For folks who stay away from the famously bitter spirit, RBF does the unthinkable — it delivers a bright and sweet flavor while retaining a hint of that famously bitter flavor. Making Malört would strip the spirit of its essence,

    Truce is also open in the mornings with coffee from Valparaiso, Indiana-based Yaggy Road Roasting Company. It’s the base for several “latte-like” drinks, which are also available later in the day for folks who don’t want to drink alcohol. There are small bites like bagels and overnight oats, too.

    Walk through the space below. Truce is now open.

    Truce, 1935 N. Damen Avenue, open 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, and 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. from Thursday to Monday

    David Mor pours a drink.

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • The Sympathizer’s best dual identity trick was its last one

    The Sympathizer’s best dual identity trick was its last one

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    The Sympathizer is full of twists and turns — and why wouldn’t it be? It’s a show (based on a book of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen) that follows a Viet Cong double agent from the end of the Vietnam War to life as a refugee in America as he works to secure the Viet Cong’s victory. All the while, the show wrestles with themes of self and identity, as filtered through The Captain (Hoa Xuande), said double agent; his Vietnamese community in 1970s Los Angeles; and the variety of white men he works for (all played by Robert Downey Jr.).

    In the final episode, we finally catch up with The Captain’s present-day story in a reeducation camp in Vietnam, led by the shadowy Commissar, who’s been demanding the Captain’s story be written out in exacting detail. It’s no surprise that the true name of the Commissar — another figure defined by his title more than himself — would be another surprise in the plot. But, like any unveiling of true identity in The Sympathizer, it’s more a twist of the knife than anything else.

    [Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for the end of The Sympathizer. This post also has some mentions of sexual assault.]

    Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO

    In the final episode, the Captain finds out the Commissar is in fact his friend Mẫn, now scarred from napalm strikes during the fall of Saigon. Worse yet, this old friend/prison camp supervisor is still going to torture him for information.

    It’s a tough way for the Captain to find out that his visions of Mẫn — alone in an office and highly decorated, leading the bright future for Vietnam — weren’t accurate. Throughout the show, the Captain’s reflections were a neat framing device and something he saw as mostly a formality, the one thing standing between him and the bright future of Communist Vietnam he had fought so hard for. Now, staring him in the face, is the cold reality of what his struggle has culminated in. It’s all in keeping with the way The Sympathizer has been using the Captain’s imaginative visions as specters of his subjective (and warped) point of view.

    “The ghosts really pertain to his consciousness, his conscience about his actions,” Xuande told Polygon. “The Captain’s journey is really about trying to survive, trying to weave his way out, and trying to never be found out, and, obviously, toeing the line between his allegiances.”

    In that light, his vision with Mẫn isn’t all that different from his visions of Sonny or the Major; they’re all, as Xuande puts it, an expression of “the trauma that he’s been hiding from.” They’re a startling way for the Captain to realize that his actions have been more about finding any means to survive than about following his communist ideals, or fighting for a better Vietnam.

    “When they come back to haunt and remind him about the very things he’s been neglecting in his memory, it’s a reminder for him that everything that he believes and thought he was doing for the cause might not actually be right.”

    This is an idea that The Sympathizer underlines again and again with the Captain’s character: Nothing about his life is straightforward or neat, and none of it went the way he planned. Even as he seems to confess to Sonny or carry out the general’s orders to kill him, the Captain is acting for his own reasons, rather than purely “the cause.”

    Mẫn (Duy Nguyễn) answering a phone and checking around him in a still from The Sympathizer

    Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO

    Such corruption of idealistic impulses is something Mẫn also knows all too well, seemingly disillusioned with the state of the country at the same time he does his job. He is, as his dual character names speak to, a different person now, much harder than he was as a spy under American imperialism. But (much like Downey Jr.’s parade of white authority figures) Duy Nguyễn wanted to make sure you could see the connective tissue between every version of Mẫn.

    “To develop this character, I had to really dig deep: What is Mẫn? How does he talk? How does he move? How does he act around his friend, or does he act alone with just the Captain?” Nguyễn says. “He’s the dentist, so he’s very still; he has to be precise. And he’s intellectual, so he has to stay upright. The way he talks is clear — so those are the parts I keep.

    “[In episode 7], he is so damaged, but he still wants to keep the presence in front of his friends. He just wants to try to be the same person his friend saw the last time.”

    Which is crucial; all of episode 7 — and the crux of The Sympathizer’s final turn — comes down to how Mẫn’s turn plays. He is the single person, the crucial vector point, around which the Captain’s story gets suddenly jerked back, calling his bluffs and calling out all his perspective gaps. Like the Captain, he is a study of dualities: a person and a rank; loyal to the cause, yet wary; a ghost from the past and a vision of the brave new fractured and corrupted world. After filtering so much of the narrative — and, with it, the war, its aftershocks, and all the complexities contained within those — through the Captain’s identity, Mẫn is the only one who can match and cut through the noise of the story the Captain has been telling himself.

    And the truth is at once infinitely more complex and far simpler than he was prepared to believe. Through his torture, the Captain finally reconciles with some of the worst things he did for the war, going all the way back to one of the earliest scenes of the show (that we now know was actually the rape of a fellow Communist agent). He has to accept who he is and where he comes from. And he has to accept that nothing about his trauma and suffering has necessarily fixed his nation. All that hardship might’ve just borne more pain — or, worse, indifference to pain. As the sexually assaulted Communist agent tells him, after all her years in the war and the camp, “nothing can disappoint” her now.

    In the end, it’s Mẫn who gets the Captain (and Bon) free of the camp, back on a boat headed for the ol’ U.S. of A. It once again makes him a study in conflict; after so many years of loving (and trying to hate) that place, it might be his salvation after all. As the Captain looks back on Vietnam, he now sees a nation of ghosts — more clearly than ever.

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    Zosha Millman

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  • Atlas director says Jennifer Lopez’s dance skills were key to mech fights

    Atlas director says Jennifer Lopez’s dance skills were key to mech fights

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    A lifetime of scarfing down sci-fi, video games, and comic books brought director Brad Peyton to the job of said lifetime: directing Jennifer Lopez in a frickin’ mech-suit movie. Signing on for Atlas, now streaming on Netflix, was an easy yes: With two big-budget Dwayne Johnson vehicles under his belt, Rampage and San Andreas, Peyton was no stranger to A-list-driven spectacle. Still, the film was an intimidating prospect for someone with a deep appreciation for mech suits, mech tanks, oversized mecha, and all the made-up classifications in between.

    “I was very aware of what had come out ahead of me,” Peyton tells Polygon. The director cites James Cameron’s Aliens and Avatar as obvious but undeniable milestones in the art of on-screen mechs. He knew that the Titanfall games put pressure on any new live-action attempt, having created full immersion into the experience of mech fighting. But when he started imagining how to rethink mechs, he returned to the first piece of mecha media that really blew him away: Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox.

    Peyton can’t quite explain why Robot Jox was his holy grail, but in talking to him, it’s obvious: Like Gordon’s whiz-bang vision of the future, where Earth’s conflicts are settled by colorful mech duels, Atlas needed clear, well-defined logic that would ground the world-building, but also let him rip in the action department in a way that would delight his inner child. And at the end of the day, he needed to be original.

    “My biggest thing was: I knew I had to separate from everything,” Peyton says. “I had no interest in repeating. I said, Pac Rim’s [mechs] are this big. In Avatar, they’re this big. In Titanfall, they’re this big. So mine is gonna be this big. This one might be square and blocky, so mine is gonna be circular. I come from animation. So a lot of it started with me sketching the silhouette and figuring how to make it unique and different.”

    Atlas takes place in a relatively sunny future that still exists in the shadow of an impending apocalypse. Decades earlier, a rogue artificial intelligence named Harlan (Shang-Chi’s Simu Liu) fled Earth for an alien planet with the intent of one day returning to lay waste to humanity. When scientists discover Harlan’s whereabouts, Terran forces launch a mission to take the fight to the robot army’s doorstep. Leading the charge: Atlas Shepherd (Lopez), a data analyst recruited to go full Jack Ryan on Harlan’s ass. Of course, the attack doesn’t go as smoothly as the Earthlings would hope, and Atlas has to begrudgingly click into an AI-powered mech suit in order to survive an alien planet populated with androids who want her dead.

    The grounded futurism of Atlas’ Earth led Peyton and his creative team to extrapolate from current military tech for the mech design. Rounded edges and exhaust pipes are lifted from F-18 planes. The interior control panels were built for theoretical functionality.

    “I had to understand all the tech from the inside out,” Peyton says. “Because of my experience on San Andreas, where I had to understand how a helicopter worked intimately to tell Dwayne what buttons to press and not to press — at least when he would listen to me! — I took that experience and wanted to make a similar experience for [Lopez]. I laid it out with the art department of why there are screens in certain places, why there are holograms in other places. And then on the day, I’m giving her little wires to be like, ‘That’s what this screen is. That’s where the screen is.’ So after going through the blocking, I pulled those away, and she had to memorize where they were.”

    Image: Netflix

    Drawings and schematics were only half of the equation. After drafting a design, Peyton set out to make his vision come to life. Coming at it from an animation background, that meant animating various walk cycles to see if the bipedal machine could move the right way.

    “The first couple of designs we had when we animated them to see how they would work — very basic animation, walk, run, walk, jog, run cycles — looked so clunky and terrible,” Peyton says. The animation team found a groove when they clarified the dynamic between man and machine. “[The mechs] are intuitive devices. The concept that I came up with was, the soldier is the brain. He doesn’t have to be super strong. He’s not like a grunt — the machine is the grunt. He is the emotional cognitive device that syncs with this thing. So it has to be able to be as fluid as a person who’s been trained in it.”

    As Atlas traverses the biomes of Harlan’s base planet — from snowy tundras to swamps inspired by Peyton’s love for Return of the Jedi — the film’s hero loosens up on her “no AI” stance and forms a cognitive link with her mech’s digital interface. Like a twist on the buddy-cop movie, the two bond for survival, which presents itself as more fluid mech motions. Early on, Atlas might be bumbling around a rocky cliff. By the end, she’s running, rolling, and slapping the hell out of robot assailants with mech-fu. The early walk cycle tests came in handy for the dramatic evolution, which Peyton was able to program into an enormous soundstage gimbal rig that stood in for the mech suit. Lopez was surprisingly well suited for the demands of the mech choreography.

    “Her background as a dancer is what allowed her to really gauge that quickly,” Peyton says. “As much as she looks like she’s walking, [the mech] is walking her, and she has to react like she’s walking. So that training as a dancer allowed her to step right into it.”

    Jennifer Lopez’s Atlas in a mech cockpit as the mech kneels in an attack position

    Image: Netflix

    It also helps that Lopez routinely performs for thousands all by her lonesome on a stadium stage. Peyton says Atlas turned out to be one of the most demanding shoots of his career, simply because for six to seven weeks, it was just Lopez performing solo on a gimbal rig that would be completely painted over with plate shots, VFX environments, and bursts of other action sequences shot elsewhere. Occasionally, voice actor Gregory James Cohan would dial in to perform the dialogue of Smith, her AI companion.

    All the prep work required to realize a mech with the capacity for real action, and clicking in a star who was up to control it, was in service of jolting the audience, says Peyton. The first time we see the mechs in action isn’t in an act of valor; they’re caught in an ambush, mid-flight. The carrier ship goes down — and so does Atlas, in her rig. Peyton’s imagination swirled at the possibilities, as evidenced in the finished sequence. “[The mech] would be tumbling, it would be spinning, it would be hit by debris. What would it be like to be trapped in that tin can? What would it sound like? What would it feel like? And once I get through that experience, well then, how can I up the ante? Well, what if I fall through black clouds, and I’m falling into basically a World War II dogfight, but with mechs and drones? […] That’s just the first, I don’t know, 20 seconds of a two-minute sequence.

    “That’s how I design,” he says. “I want to surprise you. I want to give you something you can’t see anywhere else.”

    Atlas is streaming on Netflix now.

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    Matt Patches

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  • Illinois Breweries Are Fighting Springfield for Their Right to Continue Making THC Drinks

    Illinois Breweries Are Fighting Springfield for Their Right to Continue Making THC Drinks

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    The Illinois beer industry is rallying against legislation in Springfield that, if passed, could make making low-dose THC beverages illegal. The brewers claim the dispensary lobby is ramrodding a bill through the state Senate and House that would mandate breweries and distilleries that produce drinks like THC seltzers to operate under the same (and more costly) licensing requirements as dispensaries.

    Introduced in April, the Hemp Consumer Products Act (Senate Bill 3926) presents far-reaching regulations that impact bars and taprooms, which began serving hemp-derived products in February. These products are derived from hemp rather than cannabis. Licenses would come with a $5,000 application fee and a July 1, 2026 deadline to apply.

    An amendment to that bill, filed on Tuesday, May 9, which brewers say goes beyond the scope of public safety, and adds stricter guidelines for hemp-derived products. In a statement, the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild describes the legislation “as short-sighted and the monopolization of THC under the guise of legislation” and claims that the measures would “immediately prohibit thousands of Illinois businesses manufacturing hemp-based products, including craft breweries.”

    The regulations would administer a big blow to the state’s breweries, which are searching for ways to boost sales since the industry’s peak at the start of the pandemic.

    “As craft beer has leveled out, a bunch of brewers in Illinois have seen sales of craft beer replaced by the sales of hemp-derived products,” says Ed Marszewski, co-owner of McKinley Park-based Marz Community Brewing. Marz sells the most THC drinks in Illinois. These are non-alcoholic; the state forbids selling drinks mixed with both THC and alcohol.

    About 30 Illinois breweries — roughly 10 percent of the industry — make THC-derived drinks. Marszewski accuses lobbyists of stealthily “slipping in some pork.” There’s a feeling the bills were designed to get through the Senate with minimum discussion, part of larger omnibus legislation. The fear is the bills would be bundled with other legislation and arrive on the House floor for a concurrence vote where representatives could only vote “yes” or “no” without scrutiny.

    Choom Lite is a non-alcholic sparking drink with THC.
    Central Park Bar

    “The high-level goal, which is certainly applaudable — and I support 1,000 percent — is public safety,” says Glenn McElfresh, a cannabis lobbyist, advocate, and owner of Perfectly Dosed, a Chicago company that makes emulsions so breweries can manufacture THC drinks. (Hopewell Brewing in Logan Square is one of its clients.) “The secondary part of this, the part that hurts is it’s protecting the economic interest of existing cannabis business owners.”

    Brewers, like Marszewski, point to bills introduced in February (Senate Bill 2790 and its House companion, House Bill 5306) as evidence they aren’t opposed to regulation.

    McElfresh will testify Wednesday afternoon in front of state senators in Springfield to share his insights. Reps from the Hemp Beverage Alliance and Illinois Craft Brewers Guild will assemble on Thursday morning at Hopewell Brewing for a news conference to discuss the latest news.

    The beverage industry argues that cannabis companies want to be the ones selling them to customers and controlling the market. There’s also disagreement about how the bills came into existence. Brewers believe that one organization, the Cannabis Business Association of Illinois, is behind the legislation. CBAI is a lobbyist group representing dispensaries and labs around the state.

    “We share Leader Lightford’s goals to protect children, empower consumers, and strengthen our state’s legal cannabis industry,” CBAI executive director Tiffany Chappell Ingram says in a statement to Eater. “We appreciate her leadership on this important issue and look forward to continued conversations about the best way to rein in the proliferation of synthetic THC intoxicants that are currently sickening children, confusing customers, and undermining our state’s carefully crafted cannabis market.”

    US-NEWS-ILL-HEMP-BUSINESSES-TB

    Tiffany Chappell Ingram, executive director of the Cannabis Business Association of Illinois speaks in April in Springfield.
    Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

    The bills’ sponsor, state Sen. Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood) tells Crain’s that legislators are in the process of negotiating with the hemp and cannabis industry to design a bill that “all sides can agree upon while ensuring our common goal to have a fair, just and safe industry remains.”

    While McElfresh commends Lightford’s commitment to public safety, he claims that the CBAI and other cannabis industry lobbyists have failed to engage with brewers: “How many times have you included the Craft Brewers Guild or the beer industry in discussions?” he says. “The answer has been zero’”

    Dispensary owners undergo a detailed background check and are subject to strict security requirements. There’s resentment within the cannabis industry that breweries aren’t held to equal standards and don’t pay the same in taxes.

    Breweries feel the amendment would effectively crush any growth in their sector while allowing massive cannabis companies to thrive

    “So far we are setting these huge companies coming into the space that have seemingly unlimited funds,” says Samantha Lee of Hopewell Brewing, comparing cannabis with the early, scrappier days of the craft beer industry. “It’s a very different approach and feel.”

    Lee says Hopewell began serving THC drinks in February after collaborating with Fair State Brewing Cooperative in Minnesota. Minnesota has already been a battleground for low-dose THC drinks, as the state has seen the market soar. Marszewski notes that more than 100 breweries in Minnesota manufacture THC-infused drinks. So-called “Big Cannabis” doesn’t want to see the same success unfold in Illinois, Marszewski and Lee say.

    The Illinois Brewers Guild notes that Minnesota generated $1.5 million in tax revenue from $15.4 million in sales from hemp-derived drinks two months after that state began regulating the industry in June 2022. The guild claims the state “could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue if we follow Minnesota’s model.” Minnesota’s law does have loopholes.

    The state’s beer distributors — often seen as representing the big breweries that compete with the smaller craft breweries — seem united with their smaller siblings. McElfresh says that’s uncommon.

    “This is like getting dogs and cats to agree that loud noises are scary,” he says.

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • Kendrick Lamar Went No. 1 on His Own. What Does That Mean for TDE?

    Kendrick Lamar Went No. 1 on His Own. What Does That Mean for TDE?

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    It’s late evening on March 21 as I sit wide-eyed, waiting in anticipation to listen to Heavy, the fourth album from Top Dawg Entertainment’s R&B reserve SiR. Now, two decades after being founded, TDE remains one of the few modern rap labels that can still generate excitement surrounding artist releases, regardless of who it is. Think of the pure chaos and aggression that comes with the bass on ScHoolBoy Q’s “Ride Out” (from 2016’s Blank Face LP) as he paints the picture of cutthroat confrontation that comes with life as a Hoover Gangster Crip. Think of the foggy and damn near divine Crooklin and D. Sanders–produced instrumental on Isaiah Rashad’s SZA-featured “Stuck in the Mud,” off the vibe that is The Sun’s Tirade, where Rashad details his struggles with substance abuse. Or think of the dreamy soundscape where SZA softly sings of her failed relationships and insecurities on her 2017 album, Ctrl.

    That is to say, when it was time to press play on Heavy, I was ready to hear SiR sashay through his latest romantic entanglements with dulcet vocals over airy instrumentals. But then I found out that verse dropped.

    TDE’s former franchise player, co-founder of media company pgLang, and arguably best rapper alive Kendrick Lamar seized any and all attention in music and Twitter town hall conversation when he shook the earth’s tectonic plates with a guest spot on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That,” where he took aim at the other two members of hip-hop’s “Big Three,” fellow rap megastars Drake and J. Cole. On an album laced with subliminals directed toward the Champagne Papi, Kendrick’s verse opened the floodgates for what may be hip-hop’s last great beef. In one night, SiR’s underwhelming fourth project with TDE felt like it came and went.

    Very few rappers today carry the gravitas to shift the paradigm with a single verse. Time and time again, Kendrick has proved capable of this, dating back to his now-iconic verse on Big Sean’s 2013 record “Control,” where he attempted to raise the bar of competition in the rap game. With “Like That” as the kickstarter, Kendrick both incited and won the Great War between him and Drake. For those questioning who’s the top emcee between the two rap heavyweights, Kendrick answered the question over the course of four diss tracks viciously dissecting Drake, from the eerie character study “Meet the Grahams” to the indisputable L.A. bop that is “Not Like Us.” The once “good kid” solidified his legacy as the best rapper of his generation with a decisive victory before Drake could even drop “The Heart Part 6.”

    On “Push Ups,” Drake dragged Kendrick’s current relationship with TDE founder Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith into their personal beef, taking shots at Top Dawg when attempting to belittle Kendrick’s pockets with, “Extortion baby, whole career you been shook up / ’Cause Top told you drop and give me 50 like some push-ups.” But where Drake may have been attempting to open a wound, the end result may have actually exposed how tight K.Dot and his former employers still are. Kendrick was quick to establish that there’s still love and respect for Top while refuting those claims on his first official full diss record, “Euphoria,” when he remarked, “Aye, Top Dawg, who the fuck they think they playin’ with? / Extortion my middle name as soon as you jump off of that plane, bitch.” This moment and the overwhelming support by TDE artists on social media was a reminder that Top Dawg Entertainment is a family, at least by outside appearances. Yet, when “Euphoria” was put on streaming, the copyright reading “Kendrick Lamar, under exclusive license to Interscope Records,” also a reminder that the relationship with TDE is strictly familial.

    Even if extortion seems like an exaggeration, rumors were circulating of Kendrick leaving TDE well before he announced that 2022’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers would be his final project for the label. While breaking rap streaming records with “Euphoria”—and later, again, with “Not Like Us”—Kendrick made it clear that he no longer needs the same level of support of the label that signed him at 16 years old. The only label he answers to now is Interscope under a new direct licensing agreement, shedding his ties with Dr. Dre’s Aftermath imprint, too. (Kendrick originally signed a joint deal with Interscope and Aftermath ahead of the release of good kid, m.A.A.d city.) Publicly, Punch (President of TDE and manager of SZA) and Top treated Kendrick like their baby bird leaving the nest by giving Kendrick their blessing to leave TDE and focus on pgLang, but Kendrick’s 2022 departure from TDE marked the end of their 18-year transformation from mom-and-pop record label to a rap empire. How does one continue to grow their empire after losing the fulcrum that held everything together for all those years?

    With Kendrick on the front lines winning a Pulitzer Prize and 17 Grammys while dropping undeniable rap classics bearing TDE’s name for all those years—alongside strong outings from his label siblings ScHoolboy Q, Jay Rock, Ab-Soul, SZA, and Isaiah Rashad—the TDE stamp on an artist’s release carries the same weight as a film with the A24 logo flashing at the start of its trailer. Whether that’s seeing Top Dawg sharing 2019 TDE signee Zacari’s single “Don’t Trip” like a Bat signal marking the young singer’s official arrival after he spent years leaving his vocal trail on a plethora of TDE songs. Or seeing newcomer Ray Vaughn on L.A. Leakers sporting a TDE chain under his yellow puffy as he raps his ass off about the night he met Top and Snoop Dogg. Or when “Top Dawg Entertainment” flashes in the opening credits of Doechii’s “Alter Ego” music video, which featured the Tampa-born artist taking viewers through the swamp waters of Florida in a visual that feels so foreign to the L.A.-centric label. When that TDE logo pops up, listeners expect a certain level of hip-hop excellence to follow, even if today’s TDE vastly differs from its earlier incarnation.

    In a 2022 interview with Mic, Punch discusses how things have changed since the early days of TDE. The label used to have more synergy amongst its artists, whether that was ScHoolboy Q’s handwriting being included on Kendrick’s good kid album cover or Kendrick showing out on ScHoolboy’s quadruple-platinum single “Collard Greens” less than a year later. You would often see TDE move as a unit, like during their 2013 BET Hip-Hop Awards cypher. Today, the extent of TDE synergy comes in the form of the occasional labelmate guest spot that feels less like artists intertwining styles and more like filling in an open 16 bars or hook on a song. Even Punch admits he is far less hands-on with the newer TDE artists. “With those first guys, I’m in there with them every single day, engineering. We started together and came up together. But a lot of the new artists now are coming into a situation that was already built. They have their own teams, and I just come in when they need,” he said.

    Outside of Kendrick’s departure, there have been other signs of mild turbulence within the label. In the past, TDE’s current franchise cornerstone and undeniable megastar SZA has cried for help via Twitter—using words like “hostile” when describing her delayed album and occasionally contentious working relationship with Punch—although these statements would often get deleted at some point. Carson, California, rapper Reason seems like he’s been doing everything in his power to get kicked off the label ever since joining in 2018, whether that’s getting into an argument on a podcast with co-president of TDE and son of Top himself, Moosa, or rapping over Drake beats days after the Toronto rapper accused one of TDE’s presidents of extortion.

    When comparing TDE to some of the most iconic rap labels of the past, it’s easy to imagine that losing their first superstar is officially where the decline starts. Death Row’s best days were behind them after Tupac Shakur died in 1996, and Bad Boy was never the same after the Notorious B.I.G.’s death the following year. But the untimely loss of those two greats doesn’t fully explain why those labels fell. At Death Row, Dr. Dre had already walked out the doors before Tupac’s murder, but ultimately, Suge Knight going to prison is what led to Interscope dropping the label. At Bad Boy, Mase appeared to be the one to fill the void Biggie left, going quadruple-platinum in 1997 with his debut album Harlem World, before stepping away from music in pursuit of a higher calling from religion. While this wasn’t the end of Bad Boy, it likely played a factor in Bad Boy being unable to pay back and fulfill the $50 million advance from Arista Records based on good faith earned by a lucrative 1997. Simply losing their breadwinner didn’t do those iconic labels in; a flawed infrastructure and unforeseen circumstances sank their respective ships.

    In the midst of the current rap game, TDE is in rare air. Drake’s OVO Sound is at times more focused on propping up Drake and who Drake loves right now than building the genuine camaraderie (and roster of heatmakers) of a TDE, and while J. Cole’s Dreamville stable has a lot of promise, they haven’t touched the commercial success of TDE’s best. In this era, you may not even think of TDE’s journey or what going from independent to world-renowned means anymore; you’ve come to know TDE as an institution for dope Black music.

    Now 20 years old, Top Dawg Entertainment doesn’t show signs of a sharp fall-off just yet. First and foremost, they have SZA, whose latest album, SOS, achieved meteoric commercial, critical, and Grammy success with songs like the Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping, five-times-platinum single “Kill Bill.” TDE not only has a compilation album on the way celebrating their anniversary, but Black Hippy member and original TDE rapper Jay Rock also has his fourth album, Eastside Johnny*, on the horizon. ScHoolboy Q’s latest (and most critically acclaimed) album, Blue Lips, is a testament to TDE’s ability to churn out premium bodies of work. And even with Kendrick’s “Like That” verse overshadowing SiR’s Heavy, songs like “Only Human” reflect the singer’s growth as an artist leaning more into his vulnerability. However, the real test for TDE’s prolonged success comes in developing the roster’s future. How much time is needed to turn the Ray Vaughns, Doechiis, and (checks notes to see if he’s still signed) Reasons of the label into stars? And as Isaiah Rashad continues to grow creatively with each new release, one has to imagine he has greater potential working with Warner Records and a sober mind.

    Those concerns, for now, feel like minor cracks in a well-oiled machine, with SZA’s superstardom being the engine that keeps it all running—although we hope that talk of her next album, the long-awaited Lana, getting a release sometime in the near future doesn’t have you losing sleep at night. For TDE to keep the empire standing, they must appease their queen. In a 2017 OTHERtone interview, Jimmy Iovine praised the way TDE built a buzz around SZA, leading to TDE’s joint deal for SZA with RCA being a 70-30 split in TDE’s favor. Yet still, SZA has spoken about issues with her situation. How much time is there until SZA’s deal with RCA is up, allowing her to fly out of the nest like Kendrick? And will TDE be prepared if that day comes sooner than expected?

    At TDE’s peak—somewhere within that 2016-18 era—every single one of their artists dropped a project, and their franchise player Kendrick Lamar made pit stops on almost every single release, bolstering them up through Damn., culminating with Black Panther: The Album and The Championship Tour. What’s stopping TDE from restoring the feeling with a SZA-centered label renaissance, fueled by guest spots propelling her labelmates’ albums into another stratosphere with divine vocals alone? Top and Punch have proven time and time again that they know when it’s time to strike. And for SiR’s sake, let’s hope Kendrick gives TDE a heads-up next time he plans on starting a rap beef around the time of a TDE release.

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    Jonathan Kermah

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  • The Vibe is Off for Logan Square Farmers Markets Vendors

    The Vibe is Off for Logan Square Farmers Markets Vendors

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    On the first official weekend of farmers market season in Logan Square, a report about food and produce vendors being shunned in favor of non-food vendors has many questioning the direction organizers are taking the massively popular event which returns Sunday, May 12 at a new site.

    In years past, many non-licensed non-food vendors, or vintage sellers, have set up shop outside the boundaries of the market, capitalizing on the crowds without paying the Logan Square chamber vendor fees. Police fielded complaints about these unsanctioned vendors, as neighbors cited traffic and safety concerns. Quietly, many farmers market vendors questioned if it was fair for them to pay fees while the vintage vendors — selling goods like clothes and art — took advantage.

    Block Club Chicago’s story from earlier in the week shared publicly what many Logan Square vendors had thought for years, that market organizers cared more about creating a summer festival vibe. This distorts the focus of a traditional farmers market. For example, Green City, the not-for-profit organization that holds markets in Lincoln Park, West Loop, and Avondale (in the winter), has a mission statement in which they pledge to secure “the future of food by deepening support for sustainable farmers, educating our community, and expanding access to locally-grown food.”

    But not every shopping mall is upscale with a Coach store. The neighborhood often defines a shopping center or farmers market. That philosophy is consistent with responses from the Logan Square chamber. Eater sent questions to Nilda Esparza, executive director of the chamber — she also organizes the market. Esparza, with the aid of the chamber’s board, emailed responses.

    “We love our farmers, and we serve more and more farmers every year,” a portion of the chamber’s emails reads. “While there may be a broad-based understanding of what farmers markets are supposed to do in general, the Logan Square Farmers Markets specifically is organized by the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce.”

    The chamber also argues that having more non-food stalls better serves the community.

    “The Chamber supports farmers by connecting them to the city dwellers in Logan Square — and many other Chicago neighborhoods — because it believes that this in turn supports businesses and residents in our community,” the chamber’s email continues. “The inclusion of non-food vendors serves the dual purpose of bringing more business to farmers and exposing more people to all that Logan Square and Avondale have to offer.”

    While acknowledging the effort to put on the market, vendors feel Logan Square could still be better organized. Vendors tell Eater they feared retaliation for criticizing Esparza’s decisions, including seemingly being arbitrarily moved around the market to give up prime space to non-food stalls. Hunting around for a stall is hard in a crowd, which impacts sales: “It’s hard to scramble last minute,” one food vendor says.

    Several vendors shared frustration with Esparza about erratic scheduling and said she should take cues from what other markets do. A vendor mentioned they’d like to trade dates with other vendors, but felt they couldn’t even propose the idea thanks to Esparza’s demeanor. Vendors echoed Block Club’s report, that vendors were told not to speak with the media with any concerns. They weren’t threatened with retaliation, but say it was implied.

    The loss of the nearby Discount Megamall, razed in 2016 to make room for a building that includes Andros Taverna and Target along Milwaukee Avenue, may have impacted the farmers market. “Vintage sellers,” or as the chamber calls them, “bazaar vendors,” lost space to sell their wares. Some who might have found a home at the Megamall set up shop in the park next to the market.

    The chamber found itself in a tricky position with safety and traffic concerns mounting. The market was already congested enough. The city’s licensing departments, often criticized in the restaurant world for being slow in recognizing a problem, aren’t helping.

    “We believe that the safest and most productive way to operate the farmers market in the neighborhood, in which we all live and work, is by including non-food vendors under the Logan Square Farmers Market umbrella,” the chamber board responds. “We intend to do this at least until the city provides a licensing rubric for these informal economies.”

    The Megamall situation resembles the plight of local food vendors after the sudden closures of Foxtrot and Dom’s Kitchen & Market. Vendors like Pretty Cool Ice Cream and Kyoto Black lost their biggest accounts and are looking for ways to compensate.

    Chef Sarah Stegner is a co-founder of Green City and recalls the story of Judy Schad, who founded Capriole Goat Cheese. Schad sold goat cheese at Green City Lincoln Park about seven years ago but found a home at Dom’s — customers can also find the cheese at Whole Foods and other retailers. The farmers market served as an incubator for Capriole.

    The role of incubator is one that Logan Square’s farmers market wants to play, but not just for food vendors. One vendor disparagingly compared the market to a “glorified food hall.”

    Back in 2008, legendary chef and writer Alice Waters visited Chicago and heaped praise on Green City’s mission. Chef Art Smith remembers Waters’ words, particularly her mention of Paris, and the impact the moving of its massive outdoor market, Les Helles, had on the city and its food culture. American dynamics are different, but he sees a similar transformation taking place in Fulton Market, where development has long displaced the meatpacking industry. There’s danger in rupturing connections with foodways in favor of so-called neighborhood revitalization.

    The Logan Square chamber, in a news release, said it’s thankful for Block Club’s report and tried to save face with the public.

    “We can’t comment on the accuracy of peoples’ feelings,’’ a portion of the chamber board’s emailed response to Eater reads. “We trust that they feel and believe that the market is fundamentally unfair. While this saddens us, we remain optimistic. We do know that while we strive constantly for both fairness and transparency in pursuit of our mission to support the business and community of Logan Square and Avondale, we will inevitably disappoint some people along the way.”

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • A Scottish Pub Known For Premier Fish and Chips Is Moving After 35 Years

    A Scottish Pub Known For Premier Fish and Chips Is Moving After 35 Years

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    The Duke of Perth, home of one of the city’s best plates of fish and chips and a rare Chicago pub that highlights Scottish cuisine, is moving from its original home where it has stood since 1989. Later this month, they’ll wrap up a 35-year stint at 2913 N. Clark Street. Work has already begun at their new home, 2827 N. Broadway, the former Renaldi’s Pizza. It’s about a five-minute walk southeast.

    Coincidentally, the Renaldi’s space has sentimental value for the Duke’s co-owner John Crombie. When he first emigrated to America from Dundee, Scotland, he met the woman who would become his wife. After a visit to Scotland, he flew back to Chicago where she picked him up from O’Hare International Airport and they drove directly to Renaldi’s: “It’s always been a soft spot for us,” Crombie says.

    That nostalgia didn’t fuel the move. Operating a restaurant is tough, and Crombie and his partners thought they were stuck in a rut at the original space. They weren’t making money and their lease was about to expire. Crombie feared if they renewed their lease, say for three years, they’d find themselves in the same predicament in three years. The choice was either to close or take a chance and move. Meanwhile, Renaldi’s was caught in limbo after 50 years. Though closed since September, cryptic signs left in the window left hope that a reopening was possible. That never happened and Crombie says he made an offer around Thanksgiving in November.

    The new location won’t have a lot of new bells and whistles or a new menu: “Good whisky, good beer — wonderful [all-you-can-eat] fish and chips,” Crombie reiterates. The Duke is a place for conversation and there are no TVs; that philosophy will carry over as they’re trying to recreate the Clark Street space on Broadway. Crombie says started the process of “heavy redecorating.” Out went Renadli’s old pizza oven. The Duke’s history dates back to the ‘80s when Crombie and company owned a store, International Antiques, at 2909 N. Clark Street, across from the Century Shopping Center. They purchased the building and decided to open a pub.

    Renaldi’s is closed as Duke of Perth is moving inside.
    Ashok Selvam/Eater Chicago

    But in the early years, they struggled and as the market for antiques sagged, they decided to sell the building. Crombie says two months after the sale, Chicago magazine published a story praising the Duke’s fish and chips. The positive press ignited business and the Duke was saved. The ownership also is behind another Lakeview icon, Le Creperie, having purchased the French restaurant in 2014. The original idea was to move the Duke into Le Creperie’s space, but after their landlord lowered the rent and hearing the community outcry to save Le Creperie, John and Jack Crombie changed directions.

    The plan is to close around May 25 on Clark Street, to give some of the musicians who frequently performed over the years a chance to say goodbye and to open on Broadway in early June. As Crombie and his partners, including Colin Cameron, get older, operating a bar continues to be a daunting task. Despite the temptations to close, Crombie was matter-of-fact in their reasoning to keep going.

    “Just because the Duke is the Duke and everybody likes it,” he says.

    Crombie is also amused as they purchased Renaldi’s old liquor license. The name of the license? “Shorty O’Toole’s.”

    “It’s a Scottish place buying an Italian place with an Irish name,” Crombie adds.

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • Foxtrot and Dom’s Face a Lawsuit While Former Vendors Scramble For Solutions

    Foxtrot and Dom’s Face a Lawsuit While Former Vendors Scramble For Solutions

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    The debris continues to fall in Chicago where earlier this week, the city saw all 15 Foxtrot convenience stores and two Dom’s Kitchen & Market locations suddenly close. Ex-employees have filed a class-action lawsuit against Outfox Hospitality, claiming they weren’t given proper notice of mass layoffs.

    Protestors assembled Friday morning outside of Foxtrot’s commissary in Pilsen, but legal experts remain divided on whether Outfox will be held legally accountable. Earlier this year, unionized ex-workers at the Signature Room won their lawsuit that accused restaurant management of violating the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, a safe measure requiring companies to file a notice of mass layoff with the government. Eater reviewed an email sent to some ex-Foxtrot workers dated 11 p.m. Tuesday, April 23, and signed by Outfox CEO Rob Twyman notifying employees that their jobs would be immediately eliminated and stating the message was following state law. The letter does not mention the 60-day notice the law stipulates and came after the stores closed.

    Outfox formed after Chicago-based Dom’s and Foxtrot combined last year. Foxtrot debuted as a delivery-only app in 2016 that expanded into the convenience store space opening locations in Texas, and the D.C. area. Dom’s debuted in 2021 in Lincoln Park. Both entities had major designs on scaling. In the aftermath of the closures, a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing — which former employees told Eater to look out for — has yet to pop up, clouding the picture of what went wrong. Outfox hasn’t responded to media inquiries and former vendors tell Eater they haven’t heard anything from them either. They now join the graveyard of Chicago grocery brands like White Hen Pantry, Dominick’s Finer Foods, and Moo & Oink.

    Grabbed and gone.
    John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

    But as the legal theater begins to play out, workers are setting up online fundraisers and scrambling for jobs. In Chicago, the 17 potential real estate vacancies (liquidation could slow things down), are creating a feeding frenzy. Independent grocers, liquor shop owners, and would-be restaurant owners are contacting their real estate agents, hoping to cut deals with landlords on some prime retail spaces on the North Side.

    Fresh Market Place in Bucktown is an independent grocer that’s become a champion of local vendors, where many chefs from Chicago’s top restaurants shop.

    “I would, at the very least, I would listen to an offer,” Fresh Market GM Kostas Drosos says. “I definitely will inquire — or maybe I have inquired already.”

    The demand for the Foxtrot and Dom’s locations contrasts with what’s happening on the West and South sides, where residents have clamored for more investment. The city has struggled to find a tenant in Englewood to replace Whole Foods. Locals seeking an upscale retailer with a similar cachet were rendered disappointed by the pending arrival of Yellow Banana, a division of Ohio-based Save A Lot. Some Chicagoans aren’t missing Foxtrot or Dom’s. You can’t miss what you never had.

    Meanwhile, Fancy Plants Cafe owner Kevin Schuder spent much of the week trying to reach Dom’s and Foxtrot, hoping to connect them with the Great Chicago Food Depository. He’s had no luck, and his frustrations spiked after a Sun-Times report saying workers were instructed to throw away food. Drosos compares that to when Stanley’s, a tiny independent market on the corner of North and Elston Avenue, was razed in anticipation of the Lincoln Yards development. He remembers handing out business cards and hiring a few Stanley’s workers in the two weeks before its closure in 2019.

    “Stanley’s put in notice two weeks out and said ‘Come on in, guys!’” Drosos recalls. “They were giving away the food — come in, we’re going to be closing and we’re giving discounts.”

    Foxtrot and Dom’s shared some similarities, but it wasn’t a precise fit. Both wanted to attract upscale restaurant customers. They recruited chefs for cooking demonstrations and sold gourmet items with the chefs’ names. The latter was ripped from Trader Joe’s playbook. The concerns were detailed nicely earlier this month in an article by Adam Reiner in Taste.

    But as Foxtrot raced for scale, with locations in high-rent areas like Fulton Market, execs may have skipped a step in establishing community roots, something Drosos says is integral to Fresh Market’s success. In Andersonville, Foxtrot attempted to open near Andale Market, a small independent shop that stocked specialty items from the kind of vendors Foxtrot desired. Locals pushed back.

    That disconnect with Foxtrot and its community might be why Palita Sriratana says her sales at Fresh Market and Here Here Market exceeded her brand’s sales at Foxtrot. In November, her company Pink Salt was selected through Foxtrot’s Up and Comer competition, recognizing vendors selling new snacks, dips, and coffees — stuff Foxtrot wanted to scale and sell nationwide. Sriratana makes a Thai chili jam, which belongs in the same genre as chile crunch, David Chang be damned.

    Sriratana describes the terms of winning as restrictive. They sounded like the stringent restrictions reality TV show contestants face; to be considered, candidates couldn’t already be in “major retailers.” There were “unrealistic” deadlines as Pink Salt geared up for the holiday gift-giving season — Foxtrot wanted enough jars of jam to stock at 54 stores versus the eight stores initially ordered. Sriratana says “she held her breath” and carried on with production. She says the system feels “predatory to a very vulnerable group of small makers.” Pink Salt is currently free from any restrictions.

    “I feel sad for the brands that opened [production orders] and took out loans to meet their scale,” Sriratana says.

    Here Here, founded in 2021, aimed to give vendors like Sriratana more control. Disha Gulati founded the startup in 2021 to give chefs including Rick Bayless and Stephanie Izard a digital marketplace for sauces, pasta, and spices, It allowed lesser-known names a chance to establish their brands nationally. Over the past few days, Gulati and Drosos have been inundated with requests from former Foxtrot vendors wanting shelf space. Both say they’ll expedite the process to help. Gulati says she spends much of her time connecting vendors so they could better share their experiences and succeed. She feels that’s why they feel a “strong sense of community on our platform.”

    Foxtrot had an eye toward upscale customers.
    Garrett Sweet/Eater Chicago

    Gulati was careful not to villainize Outfox, saying she doesn’t know what pressures they faced: “Them going under might have been inevitable,” she says.

    But when discussing how Outfox closed without warning without informing vendors, Gulati says: “One hundred percent they should have done it differently.”

    Justin Doggett has sold his Kyoto Black bottled cold brew coffees at Foxtrot since 2021 when the store reps approached him saying they wanted to stock his coffee. He never worried about Foxtrot reverse engineering his Kyoto-style cold brews: “It’s fairly unique, it’s a very niche product,” he says.

    Foxtrot represented his biggest wholesale customer — all 15 Chicago Foxtrots stocked Kyoto Black. The sudden loss of the marketplace has forced Doggett to launch a campaign to grow his monthly subscription base, where customers would buy coffee directly from him. He says he’s had zero contact with Foxtrot since the announcement and feels blindsided.

    “Their closure represents a loss of thousands of dollars of sales per month,” Doggett wrote in a Facebook post from Tuesday, April 23. “It also devastates my brand presence. People would order from me directly all the time because they first had my coffee at Foxtrot.”

    Doggett says he made $120 in coffee deliveries on Monday. If this was in June, prime cold brew season, that delivery could have been larger. He’s looking for 800 new monthly customers; basically converting his Foxtrot customers to direct customers.

    Some independent coffee shops, the same ones that Foxtrot sought to compete with, are helping out. Side Practice Coffee and Drip Collective have offered to sell Kyoto Black while Doggett adjusts. He knows that he won’t make up for the loss immediately. He also stressed that the workers he interacted with treated him well and shouldn’t be conflated with the corporate business.

    History has repeated itself for Sriratana who has experience with start-ups suddenly closing; Pink Salt was also the name for her Thai food stall inside Fulton Galley, a food hall in Fulton Market. It closed in 2019, without warning, after being open for five months. The space — located less than a half mile west from Outfox’s headquarters — is now a Patagonia store.

    “My experience with Fulton Galley made me not trust the partnership with Foxtrot and pushed me to really value independent businesses — I cannot stress that enough,” she says.

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • Snapped Out Of It

    Snapped Out Of It

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    I don’t understand what’s wrong with my brain, I was incredibly depressed for 5 days, ready to pepsi myself and then boom, 8pm last night sitting on the couch and it went away, got up cleaned the house, went to the gym, basically like it never happened.

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  • Fallout: New Vegas endures because of big clunky story swings

    Fallout: New Vegas endures because of big clunky story swings

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    Fallout: New Vegas has endured in the cultural zeitgeist in a way that few other games have. Even within the Fallout fandom, it’s earned a prized position as a true classic of the RPG genre. That love is still reflected today, in goofy memes and fan art and enduring debates over which endgame is the right one. Even though the game has aged terribly in some respects — characters look rough, and not just from living in the apocalypse — it still persists as one of the high points of the Fallout franchise. The new Fallout TV series is set to premiere on Amazon, so there’s seldom been a better time to revisit New Vegas or play it for the first time.

    Fallout: New Vegas opens with an exploration of the Mojave Wasteland, setting up some of the factions vying for control of this region of post-apocalyptic America. This game builds off the lore of the first two isometric RPGs, returning to the West Coast. The New California Republic, a democratic attempt at building back an old America, has expanded too far. Here, at the Hoover Dam, they struggle to hold on to territory. Caesar’s Legion, an army emulating the empire of old Rome, has met the NCR here in a clash of ideologies. New Vegas, a sparkling city of progress run by the mysterious Mr. House, dominates the skyline with its neon towers.

    Unfortunately, the player character will need to work up to confronting these forces. The game begins with the Courier being waylaid by a smooth-talking group of goons. You awake in a friendly local doctor’s home, having miraculously survived being shot in the head and left in a shallow grave. You sort out matters in the small town of Goodsprings and then begin your trek into the Mojave.

    Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Bethesda Softworks

    New Vegas is built on the bones of Fallout 3, and the gameplay is honestly so-so. But the game is elevated by its fantastic writing. There are four possible paths the Courier can choose from: joining the NCR, allying with Mr. House, enlisting in Caesar’s Legion, or pursuing an independent Mojave. There’s a similar structure to Fallout 4, but I failed to connect with the various ideologies of the Commonwealth. They were a little too simplistic and flat. Fallout: New Vegas is anything but that.

    The questions posed in New Vegas are much more interesting to me as a player. At first, the NCR appears to be the default good guy faction. But one companion, Cass, openly expresses skepticism of the government. She critiques their expansion with the memorable line: “Nobody’s dick is that long, not even Long Dick Johnson. And he had a fucking long dick, hence the name.” Hanging out with Boone, a stoic and surly sniper I meet in the mouth of a giant dinosaur tower, complicates things further. After enough time working together, he shares the trauma incurred by his time with the NCR.

    Every companion in this game has opinions, and they’re interesting. New Vegas has a bunch of wildly interesting ideas, and it’s not shy about running with them. Lily Bowen is a giant nightkin super mutant who wears a giant sun hat and shades. Raul is a ghoul gunslinger who’s been press-ganged into service as a mechanic for a hostile state of super mutants. Arcade Gannon is a doctor and scientist who automatically joins your party if you have an intelligence of 3 or less, because he feels like someone needs to take care of you.

    The NCR may be complicated, but Caesar’s Legion poses a serious threat — or opportunity, depending on your decisions — to the denizens of the Mojave. The player is introduced to the faction through Nipton, a sinful town sentenced to a gruesome ritual known as the Lottery. The encounter starts with a guy running at you, hysterically laughing and screaming that he won, he won! You quickly realize that his joy is closer to a wild hysteria, and something truly terrible has happened in Nipton.

    A player in Fallout: New Vegas confronts two security automotons, bulky robots with grasping hands that balance on one wheel, with a rifle.

    Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Bethesda Softworks

    Mr. House offers a potential third path, but as I quest around the Strip, I can’t help but realize how many impoverished communities have sprung up in its shadow. I can’t even get in — under penalty of being shot by a giant murder robot — unless I meet specific qualifications. Can I trust the reclusive master of the Strip and its casinos? Or is it worth forging a new path for the Mojave, with no masters or kings?

    Each of these factions have interesting characters. Caesar is definitely a bad guy, and I have journeyed through his camp to blow him up in new and satisfying ways many times over the years. But it’s also worth talking philosophy with him, and learning more about the Legion and the sort of civilization they would establish. He’s not a mustache-twirling villain, but a satisfying antagonist to face and defeat.

    This is all skimming the surface of what New Vegas has to offer. The cherry on top of this great RPG is a radio station that’s full of bangers, with a particular shoutout to Big Iron. But the game takes big swings, and the overall vision is able to balance both serious themes and some intense goofiness.

    Similar open-world RPGs have quickly faded from conversation after their launch. Even a recent big RPG epic like Starfield has fallen off most of our radars. But Fallout: New Vegas fans are still making memes, arguing about the endgame variables, and sharing build tips to this day. It’s a clunky game in many respects, the characters don’t look great, and there’s the occasional glitch. I don’t care. Fallout: New Vegas is still the apple of my eye, and showcases how brilliant the setting can be.

    Fallout: New Vegas is available to play on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Game Pass, and Windows PC via Steam and GOG.

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    Cass Marshall

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  • Inside Chicago’s New Desi Bakery and Masala Chai Cafe

    Inside Chicago’s New Desi Bakery and Masala Chai Cafe

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    Cafes in India often feel like French cafes with similar layouts. The differences stem from Indian bakers using croissants and other baked goods as vehicles for savory flavors like the spiced potatoes that fill a samosa or the tamarind zing from chutney used in snacks like chaat.

    And though coffee is popular, especially in places in South India where kaapi, filter coffee made with chicory and cardamom, Indian customers have the patience to wait for a properly brewed cup of masala chai. Generally, there’s a void for cafes that feature teas for all varieties in Chicago, and while there are a few South Asian snack shops that feature desserts like gulab jamun or burfi, baked goods aren’t as easy to track down. Thattu in Avondale offers a puff filled with spicy beets, but there are more possibilities, especially when the authenticity police go off duty which can allow for more flavor mingling.

    That’s the goal at Swadesi, a new cafe that recently opened in West Loop. It comes from Sujan Sarkar, the chef behind the city’s only Michelin-starred Indian restaurant, Indienne. Sarkar was also the opening chef at Rooh Chicago in West Loop and brought over Yash Kishinchand to manage the cafe. Sarkar is familiar with Kishinchand due to their time working at Rooh Columbus in Ohio.

    Swadesi’s menu is more of a second-generation South Asian American feel that bridges Western and Eastern tastes. That creates inventions like croissants with samosa chaat or butter chicken. Jaggery, a cane sugar that’s used in South Asia, is used in a chocolate chip cookie. Beyond the baked goods there are breakfast and lunch sandwiches served on pav, a type of roll the size of a slider bun.

    They’ll eventually serve wine and beer, but it’s mostly a daytime affair. There are rumblings about hosting pop-up events in the evenings. As far as the tea, it’s imported from India and staff will take their time brewing. Other drinks include an oak smoke vanilla latte, malted milk chocolate mocha, and turmeric & ginger latte.

    Tour the space and check out some of the food below.

    Swadesi, 328 S. Jefferson Street, open 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays.

    Butter Chicken Croissant

    Butter Chicken Croissant

    Jaggery chocolate chip cookie

    Jaggery chocolate chip cookie

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • Embracer has sold Gearbox — and Borderlands — to Take-Two for $460M

    Embracer has sold Gearbox — and Borderlands — to Take-Two for $460M

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    Troubled gaming conglomerate Embracer announced Thursday that it has agreed to sell Gearbox Entertainment, the studio behind the Borderlands games, to Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two for $460 million.

    The deal makes a lot of sense; Take-Two has been the publisher for Borderlands through its 2K Games label since long before Gearbox was acquired by Embracer in 2021. In its press release, 2K said the next Borderlands game was in active development at Gearbox.

    As part of the deal, Take-Two acquires the Borderlands franchise and its spinoff series Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, as well as the Homeworld, Risk of Rain, Brothers in Arms, and Duke Nukem series. The studios acquired by Take-Two are the Gearbox Software mothership in Frisco, Texas, as well as Gearbox Montréal and Gearbox Studio Quebec.

    “As a significant long-term Embracer Group shareholder, I believe in the strategy for the Embracer Group going forward and am completely convinced that this transaction is the best possible scenario and an obvious net positive arrangement for Embracer Group, for Take-Two and, of course, for Gearbox Entertainment,” said Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford. “My primary interest is always Gearbox, including our talent and our customers. I want to personally ensure fans of our games that this arrangement will ensure that the experiences we have in development at Gearbox will be the best it can possibly be.”

    Embracer is hanging on to a few parts of the Gearbox empire: Gearbox Publishing San Francisco (which well be renamed), including the publishing rights to the Remnant games and Hyper Light Breaker; Cryptic Studios, the massively multiplayer specialist, with its games Neverwinter Online and Star Trek Online; and support studios Lost Boys Interactive and Captured Dimensions.

    Though Gearbox Publishing San Francisco is still under Embracer, the company confirmed to Polygon that it has laid off an unspecified number of employees “not tied to the development” of Gearbox games. The layoffs appear to impact marketing, communications, and other portions of the company.

    “The Embracer Group will continue to report on their restructuring program that impacted some parts of Gearbox today that are not tied to the development of Gearbox Software games,” a spokesperson told Polygon. “Thank you for granting us the space to remain focused on our people and in our handling of the situation with compassion and manage the process, balancing between our present duty and a commitment to our future.”

    For Embracer, the sale of Gearbox — one of its most prized assets — is the next step in a deep cost-cutting and restructuring process the company began last year after a reported $2 billion deal fell through. As part of its restructuring, Embracer laid off at least 900 people. Prior to its financial difficulties, the Swedish group, which began life as Nordic Games, had been on a wild acquisition spree that included the purchase of board game giant Asmodee, Square Enix’s Western studios and franchises including Tomb Raider, and the media rights for The Lord of the Rings.

    Embracer also announced Thursday that it had completed the sale of another of its biggest studio groups, Saber Interactive, which it acquired in 2020. Saber’s founder Matthew Karch bought back the main Saber Interactive studio and several subsidiaries for $247 million, while Embracer retained Metro developer 4A Games, Aspyr, and others. Saber has the right to acquire 4A and pinball specialist Zen Studios within a certain time period, although publishing rights for the Metro games will stay with Embracer’s subsidiary Plaion. Saber is reportedly still collaborating with Embracer on the troubled remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

    Update: This story has been updated to include news concerning layoffs at Gearbox Publishing, along with a statement from the company.

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    Oli Welsh

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  • Etta’s Assets Are Scheduled for Auction

    Etta’s Assets Are Scheduled for Auction

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    Etta founder David Pisor is no longer in charge of operations at his Bucktown restaurant, according to bankruptcy-related court documents. The news comes nearly two months after Pisor’s Etta Collective filed for bankruptcy in multiple states and as the once nationally recognized restaurant group’s assets head to auction next week.

    The court’s order only pertains to Etta Bucktown, meaning Pisor remains at Aya Pastry. Pisor did not respond to a request for comment.

    In the interim, the court has appointed Rafael Gaspar as manager of the Bucktown restaurant. The court has ordered that a sale must be finalized by Monday, April 15. Gaspar, who represents the debtors, owns a few Chicago-area restaurants including Fireside Restaurant in Ravenswood, and has no prior relationship with Pisor, according to court documents. Etta’s debtors made a motion to appoint Gaspar on March 1. His role is to “use his reasonable best efforts during the term to improve and maximize the financial performance of the restaurants and to keep them operational and maximize their value through the closing of the sale.”

    In January and February, Pisor made five Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings covering his two Ettas in Chicago; Etta Scottsdale, Arizona; Aya Pastry in West Town; and his parent company, Etta Collective. He closed Etta River North in January after closing an Etta in Culver City, California, in December. He’s been involved in restaurants in Chicago, California, and Texas, and is a co-founder Gold Coast steakhouse Maple & Ash, though he is no longer affiliated with that restaurant group. Pisor’s relationship with Maple & Ash co-founder Jim Lasky deteriorated and the partners eventually reached an agreement to settle competing lawsuits against each other, and in January 2023 severed ties, with Pisor taking control of Etta properties, Aya Pastry, and Cafe Sophie under a new company, Etta Collective. Etta struggled after the split from the highly profitable Maple & Ash brand. Workers for Etta Collective in Chicago accused management of taking dental insurance premiums from their paychecks without paying for coverage in addition to other internal issues. Projects in Evanston, Downtown Chicago, and Texas have also been canceled or postponed due to the bankruptcy filings.

    The order to appoint Gaspar was issued on March 12, according to a filing through the United States Bankruptcy Court of Delaware. The auction, scheduled for Monday, March 25, isn’t open to the public; parties had until the morning of Wednesday, March 20, to declare their interest in participating in the auction to undergo the appropriate financial background checks.

    Two Etta locations, in Bucktown and Scottsdale, Arizona, remain, In late February, he filed notice of an agreement with John Leahy, a “stalking horse bidder.” The stalking horse — a bankruptcy term — who reaches an agreement with the bankrupt party to put in the initial auction bid and establishing a minimum bid for the party’s assets at auction. Leahy, who owns Lulu’s in Waikiki, Hawai’i, started the bidding at $675,000, according to court documents. The winning bid would also have to assume Etta’s debt, which includes $2.5 million owed to Wintrust. Other local vendors, from Rare Tea Cellar to Closed Loop Farms, are listed among Etta’s debts.

    Pisor in February described Leahy as “a long-time colleague who is interested in helping us restructure and emerge stronger from this bankruptcy.” That means that Pisor could retain control over Etta if his colleague’s bid wins. Any deal, whether it’s involving Leahy, Gaspar, or another party, must close by the aforementioned April 15 date, according to court documents. Former Etta workers and those who have worked with Etta have told Eater there’s hope that a new owner could move Etta past its current financial crisis while reopening the River North location.

    Aya Fukai, the founder of Aya Pastry, is owed $500,000 from Pisor after she left the business in October and sold her stakes in the West Town bakery for $700,000. She says she received $200,000 but has told Eater she’s not banking on seeing the rest. Pisor waited until February to mention Fukai’s departure and promoted a bakery worker to replace her. That replacement has since left Aya Pastry, a month after Pisor announced she’d taken the job.

    Sources who have worked at Etta say that the news of the bankruptcy, and how the company handled employer dental insurance coverage has hurt business in Bucktown. The workers who remain are frustrated that their jobs are more difficult in the aftermath. They’re also dealing with low staffing levels, which hurt morale and created a rift between current employees and the former workers who were outspoken about their treatment. Meanwhile, vendors aren’t looking forward to working with Etta, given the company’s bankruptcy status.

    In the wake of the bankruptcies and claims of mismanagement, Etta has launched a social media campaign leaning into normalcy and stability. An Instagram ad proudly announces, “the classics are back.” The phrasing was seemingly a response to former employees who claimed that popular items were removed off Etta’s menu because Pisor didn’t want to be reminded of former chef Danny Grant who had departed when Etta’s parent company was split in January 2023. In February, Pisor denied that claim.

    The restaurant is even riding the success of The Bear, and involved in a gift card giveaway with other restaurants as part of a promotion benefitting radio station WBEZ offering a tour of the restaurants featured in the TV show.

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • Diablo 4 joined by The Quarry, MLB The Show 24, and more on Xbox Game Pass

    Diablo 4 joined by The Quarry, MLB The Show 24, and more on Xbox Game Pass

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    Xbox is jumping into spring with a huge slate of games coming to Xbox Game Pass. Starting today, the service will be getting Lightyear Frontier, a space exploration and farming sim with a mech, and MLB The Show 24, which also launched Tuesday across platforms and will feature women players for the first time in franchise history.

    Arguably the biggest addition, though, is Diablo 4 on March 28, the first new Activision Blizzard title to hit Game Pass since Microsoft’s acquisition of the company was completed last year. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said that players shouldn’t expect all Activision Blizzard games to drop onto Game Pass the moment the deal was finalized, but this signals the start of more additions to come. New Diablo 4 players will also have plenty of time to play this RPG for dozens of hours before the paid DLC Vessel of Hatred releases later this year.

    There’s also Supermassive Games’ The Quarry, a previous PS5 console exclusive and spiritual successor to Until Dawn. This time, a group of teenage counselors have to survive a night at an abandoned camp while being stalked by violent creatures and mysterious locals. As the player, you have to make a series of choices on behalf of all the characters to try and ensure everybody makes it out alive. (Spoiler alert: It’s very unlikely you will succeed.)

    If none of those games are for you, this is still a very packed list of new titles for the rest of March into April. Here’s the full list:

    • Lightyear Frontier (Game Preview) (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) — March 19
    • MLB The Show 24 (Cloud and Console) — March 19
    • The Quarry (Cloud and Console) — March 20
    • Evil West (Cloud, Console, and PC) – March 21
    • Terra Invicta (Game Preview) (PC) – March 26
    • Diablo IV (Console and PC) – March 28
    • Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged (Cloud, Console, and PC) – March 28
    • Open Roads (Cloud, Console, and PC) – March 28
    • Ark: Survival Ascended (Cloud, PC, Xbox Series X|S) – April 1
    • F1 23 (Cloud) EA Play – April 2
    • Superhot: Mind Control Delete (Cloud, Console, and PC) – April 2

    As you can imagine, with the release of MLB The Show 24, last year’s MLB The Show 23 will be leaving Xbox Game Pass at the end of the month, along with two other games:

    • Hot Wheels Unleashed (Cloud, Console, and PC)
    • Infinite Guitars (Cloud, Console, and PC)
    • MLB The Show 23 (Cloud and Console)

    Xbox Game Pass costs $10.99 a month, while PC Game Pass costs $9.99 a month. PC Game Pass includes EA Play access, which offers another 70 games on PC. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, at $16.99 per month, gives subscribers access to everything — the PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass libraries, EA Play on both console and PC — as well as access to online multiplayer. Xbox Game Pass Core (formerly called Xbox Live Gold) costs $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year.

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    Carli Velocci

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  • Chicago’s Most Anticipated Restaurant Openings, Spring 2024

    Chicago’s Most Anticipated Restaurant Openings, Spring 2024

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    If this sounds like a broken record, it is — restaurants all around America are facing unprecedented economic challenges. Still, there are plenty of new projects to look forward to as 2024 is shaping up to be a big one in Chicago, especially as a mild winter has locals and tourists dreaming of outdoor dining during the spring and summer months. At Eater Chicago, we’ve listed 15 upcoming restaurants targeting a spring debut. Among them, seven are either relocations or sequels to existing restaurants. The latter means the new venues feature either more seating or bigger menus. It’s not the same song.

    There are also two tasting menu restaurants and three bars. New bars could indicate that the city is healing from the pandemic. And speaking of pandemic trends (when comfort foods concepts, like pizzerias, started sprouting up seemingly everywhere) there’s one new pizzeria opening — and it’s replacing another pizzeria. Time marches on. But at least Chicagoans can rely on delicious new options. Explore the most anticipated openings of spring below.

    Bayan Ko Diner owners Lawrence Letrero (left) and Raquel Quaderny.
    Aliya Ikhumen/Eater Chicago

    Address: 1820 W. Montrose, Ravenswood

    Key Players: Raquel Quadreny, chef Lawrence Letrero

    After Glenn’s Diner, a decade’s old greasy spoon in Ravenswood closed, the owners of Bayan Ko, a Filipino and Cuban restaurant a few doors east, saw an opportunity. The husband-and-wife team is opening their second restaurant, a greasy spoon with items like a Cuban smash patty melt, lumpia, and more. The diner will also serve classic dishes from the original Bayan Ko as daily specials. That space has since morphed into a reservation-only restaurant serving a set menu. Look for an April opening.

    Address: 3154 W. Diversey, Logan Square

    Key Players: Chef Mark Steuer, Milkhorse Hospitality

    The opening date for the bar replacing Lost Lake in Logan Square continues to slide. The target was December 31, but it’s been repeatedly pushed and now it’s April. Nevertheless, chef Mark Steuer, who’s long served southern cuisine at restaurants like Carriage House in Wicker Park and Funkenhausen in West Town, is bringing fun takes on comfort food, like cornbread with foie gras, and more. The space, once decorated with tropical and tiki vibes, is going in a different direction and leaning into ‘80s nostalgia. Steuer and company are touting the bar’s employee benefits rarely seen for restaurant workers — for example, PTO and health care coverage — is proof of their common decency.

    A cocktail in a blue stemmed glass.

    This cocktail is called the Captured Shadow.
    Marisa Klug-Morataya/Dearly Beloved

    Key players: Chireal Jordan, Brian Galati

    Address: 900 N. Franklin Street, Near North Side

    Headquarters Beercade founders Chireal Jordan and Brian Galati have been reluctant to share details about their latest venue, Dearly Beloved, which takes over the former home of French dining stalwart Kiki’s. The duo calls it a “cocktail restaurant,” which means that drinks will be the main attraction inside the 6,000-square-foot space with rare spirits and other drinks with striking and surprising presentations. The food will focus on vegetables, tapping into the founders’ embrace of the unexpected in inventions like a zucchini dish designed to taste like filet mignon. It’s set to debut on Wednesday, May 1.

    A slender man wearing all black squatting in the woods.

    Feld owner Jake Potashnick at Froggy Meadow Farm.
    Barry Brecheisen/Eater Chicago

    Key player: Jacob Potashnick

    Address: 2018 W. Chicago Avenue, West Town

    Chicago native Jacob Potashnick is plugging away in West Town. Feld is a unique fine dining restaurant where Feld will draw upon his international work experiences with a tasting menu format. Imagine an open space where staff works in the middle of the dining room; Potashnick wants to keep everyone comfortably seated to keep the spirit of the room proper. He’s working with SPACE Architects and Variant Collaborative and they’re applying the final touches on the space. An avid social media user, Potashnick mentions the final stretch; he’s been busy taking meetings and, like many restaurant owners before the debut, is feeling a little anxious at this juncture. He’s even grown a mustache. Potashnick says they hope to debut with a few soft launch dinners before officially opening to the public in June.

    A dark plate holds four crispy spring rolls sitting on a green leaf.

    Egg rolls are a classic Khmai dish.
    Eater/Melissa Blackmon

    Address: 6580 N. Sheridan, Rogers Park

    Key Players: Mona Sang, Sarom Sieng, Loyola University

    A rare Chicago restaurant where traditional Cambodian food is the star, Khmai Fine Dining made a major splash in 2022 when chef and owner Mona Sang’s project was named one of Eater’s 15 Best New Restaurants in America. Khmai drew hoards of diners to Rogers Park for the rich, deep, and concentrated flavors that characterize Khmer cuisine. In late November, Sang closed the original location and she’s now signed a lease with Loyola University to bring her restaurant near the Rogers Park campus. An ode to Sang’s mother, Sarom Sieng, the new restaurant will expand service and offer breakfast and lunch, plus new dishes. Sang says she’s eager to accelerate the timeline as her mother — now age 80 and a survivor of the Cambodian genocide and a fixture in Khmai’s kitchen — is champing at the bit to get back to business in April.

    Key players: Jun-Jun Vichaikul, Naomi Hattori, chef Eric Hattori

    Address: 3443 N. Sheffield Avenue, Wrigleyville

    The Hotel Zachary and the owners of the Chicago Cubs, the Ricketts family, have reshaped Wrigleyville, squeezing out many independent businesses. But just south of the baseball field, spouses Jun-Jun Vichaikul and Naomi Hattori are taking their best swings at bringing something unique to the neighborhood under local ownership. The couple plans on opening their second location of Konbini & Kanpai, a Japanese American bottle shop, to Wrigley inside the former Dark Horse Tap. The new shop is larger than the Lakeview original and includes a full kitchen. They’ve brought on Naomi Hattori’s brother, chef Eric Hattori (previously of pan Asian food truck Piko Street Kitchen) to create a menu of casual nisei-influenced dishes like egg salad sands on milk bread and bowls of udon. Vichaikul promises an entirely new lineup of Asian spirits, beers, and cocktails like a sake-based Old Fashioned with ginger syrup and barley shochu. Stay tuned for an April or May debut.

    Indus

    Bhoomi co-owners Ajit and Such Kalra pose for a picture in their new location at Urban Space, located at 15 W. Washington St. in the Loop, Saturday afternoon, Sept. 18, 2021.

    Indus co-owners Ajit (left) and Sukhu Kalra pose at Urban Space in 2021.
    Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

    Address: 617 Central Avenue, Highland Park

    Key Players: Sukhu and Ajit Kalra

    The team behind Bhoomi, the food stall at the former Urban Space Food Hall — now known as Washington Hall — is opening a full-service restaurant in suburban Highland Park. Sukhu and Ajit Kalra are promising a menu with traditional dishes and modern twists, from curries to wagyu steaks, smoked meats, and a curated selection of wine paired with fun cocktails. The name pays homage to the Indus Valley. They feel it was one of the first to incorporate spices in their cooking, to make food about pleasure more than just sustenance. The new tagline for the restaurant is “Progressive Indian.” They’re looking at a May opening.

    Pita with a bunch of spreads and pickles.

    Kor is opening inside the Godfrey Hotel.
    Kor/Austin Handler

    Address: 127 W. Huron Street, River North

    Key Players: Soiree Hospitality, chef Onur Okan, Godfrey Hotel

    The owners of Rooh Chicago are opening their fourth restaurant brand with chef Onur Okan, a Turkish native who’s cooked at Michelin-starred restaurants like Aliena and Claudia. A wood-burning grill is essential to the menu, with grilled meats and veggies with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean influences. The owners are waiting for licenses and working with the Godfrey in hopes of a late March opening.

    A rendering of a new restaurant coming to Chicago.

    Minyoli

    Key player: Chef Rich Wang

    Address: 5420 N. Clark Street, Andersonville

    Taiwanese beef noodle soup, a staple embraced by many as the country’s national dish, will be the star at Minyoli, the first solo project from Boka alum Rich Wang. He’s taking over the former home of Land & Lake Kitchen and Passerotto in Andersonville. Wang’s a native of Taipei, and the menu includes a traditional beef noodle soup, characterized by a deep herbal broth infused with cardamom and cinnamon, filled with springy hand-cut noodles, and tender cuts of beef shank. He’ll also serve lu wei, or snacks braised in the same soup stock, and Taiwanese liquors, beer, and cocktails. The story’s personal for Wang, born in a juàn cun, a “military dependents’ village,” where much of the food originates. These Taiwanese hodge-podge enclaves were first established in the late 1940s toward the end of the Chinese Civil War to house Chinese military personnel and their families. Minyoli should debut in April.

    A square pie with pepperoni and ricotta.

    Profesor Pizza is a master of many pizza styles.
    Barry Brecheisen/Eater Chicago

    Address: 1610 N. Wells Street, Old Town

    Key Players: Anthony Scardino, Fifty/50 Restaurant Group

    Anthony Scardino has a competitive pizza background and has worked at some of Chicago’s best pizza restaurants. He’s got a passion for Italian food and thoughtfully produces some of the city’s best pizzas. After working at a few ghost kitchens, he’s ready to commit to Old Town where he’ll take over the former Roots Pizza near Wells and North, partnering with the restaurant’s owners, Fifty/50 Restaurant Group. The two parties promise a new restaurant that distills Scardino’s personality. As the restaurant neighbors Second City, there’s potential for collaborations with the legendary comedy troop. The target opening date is, and this is no misprint, April 20. Think about it. Then forget about it.

    A plate of slice ribs and a cup of red bbq sauce.

    Soul & Smoke is expanding in Evanston.
    Barry Brecheisen/Eater Chicago

    Address: 1601 Payne Street, Evanston

    Key Players: Heather Bublick and D’Andre Carter

    Soul & Smoke, a member of the Eater Chicago 38, is one of the city’s best barbecue restaurants thanks to the husband-and-wife team of D’Andre Carter and Heather Bublick. The two have fine dining experience, and it’s the little touches that lead to world-class brisket and ribs. Their first restaurant was in Evanston, and they are going big in the suburbs. Unlike their counter-service restaurant along the river in Avondale, the restaurant inside a 100-year barn will be full service. They’ll also have a “speakeasy-style dining room” with upscale offerings, a throwback to the couple’s day working at Moto in West Loop. Look for a late spring opening.

    Steingold’s is opening a location in Wrigleyville.
    Steingold’s of Chicago

    Address: 3630 N. Clark Street, Wrigleyville

    Key Players: Aaron Steingold, Cara Peterson

    American Jewish communities have long enjoyed a love affair with baseball, which makes it seem like beshert (Yiddish for “inevitable” or “pre-ordained”) that Steingold’s of Chicago is at work on a new location across from Wrigley Field. Chef and owner Aaron Steingold, a self-professed baseball historian who originally founded his modern Jewish deli in 2017, will bring his popular bagels, deli sandwiches, and a few new items (think latke-tot poutine and everything bagel-dogs on sticks) to the former home of West Town Bakery inside the Hotel Zachary. Culinary director Cara Peterson also promises special soft-serve ice cream in flavors like baklava with honey and salted caramel. While the debut’s been pushed; it won’t happen on baseball’s Opening Day as planned, Steingold tells Eater they hope to open in May.

    An assortment of Chinese food from 3 Little Pigs.

    3LP is expanding to Bridgeport.
    Aliya Ikhumen/Eater Chicago

    Address: 964 W. 31st Street, Bridgeport

    Key Players: Henry Cai, Maria’s Community Bar

    Henry Cai, the South Side native, continues to spread his culture with unique fast-casual offerings of Chinese-American and Cantonese cuisine. His signature dish is fried rice with three different types of pork, or “three little pigs.” After launching as a takeout-only spot he opened inside Molly’s Cupcakes in South Loop. He’s expanding once more in Bridgeport, where he’ll take over the space formerly occupied by Pleasant House Bakery, Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream, and Herbivore. Look for a mid-April or early-May opening with his signature chicken sandwiches and more.

    Chef Evan Funke looking at a tray of pasta.

    Evan Funke is an LA chef whose vision comes to Chicago in the form of Tre Dita.
    Wonho Frank Lee/Eater LA

    Address: St. Regis Chicago, 401 E. Wacker Drive, Lakeshore East

    Key Players: ​​Chef Evan Funke, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises

    Chicago’s largest restaurant group, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, will complete its two-restaurant project inside the flashy St. Regis skyscraper this spring with the debut of Tre Dita, a Tuscan steakhouse from noteworthy LA chef Evan Funke (Felix), The bar opened in late February, but Funke promises much more when the restaurant debuts. Tre Dita will also house a pasta lab where the team can highlight the traditional pasta shapes of Tuscany. It’s scheduled to open in mid-March.

    Address: 2020 W. Division Street, Wicker Park

    Key Players: Stephen Gillanders

    Valhalla, a fine dining restaurant that started on the second floor at Time Out Market in Fulton Market, is relocating to Wicker Park inside the former Mirai Sushi space. Gillanders, a chef behind S.K.Y. Restaurant in Pilsen and Apolonia in South Loop, in early March, confirmed the move on Instagram, a month after applying for a liquor license. He writes: “Trends are avoided at all costs and every idea is met with the question: ‘Why?’ If an idea doesn’t truly have a positive impact on guest experience, it’s tossed out.” He’s declined to reveal exactly when the restaurant will open but writes “soon.”

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • ‘Shogun’ Episode 3, Influential Childhood TV Shows, and Trailers for ‘3 Body Problem’ and ‘Fallout’

    ‘Shogun’ Episode 3, Influential Childhood TV Shows, and Trailers for ‘3 Body Problem’ and ‘Fallout’

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    Chris and Andy talk about the third episode of Shogun and how the show uses confrontation set pieces to drive the plot (1:00). Then, they answer a few more mailbag questions, talking about the lasting impact of Dune: Part Two (28:16), the most influential TV shows of their childhoods (41:24), and the trailers for 3 Body Problem and Fallout (48:18).

    Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald
    Producer: Kaya McMullen

    Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS

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    Chris Ryan

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  • Chicago’s Top Spots for Creative Halal Street Eats

    Chicago’s Top Spots for Creative Halal Street Eats

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    Halal or Zabiha meat can be eaten all over Chicago, but the spots that usually come to mind are the foods of Muslim-majority countries.

    Middle Eastern, North African, West African, and South Asian food is usually the first that comes to mind when it comes to halal or zabiha cuisine as it is typically enjoyed in Muslim-majority countries. The truth is Chicagoans can find items all over the area, especially on famed Devon Avenue and suburbs like Bridgeview that have everything from Yemeni to Palestinian food, all halal.

    An uptick in vegetarian and vegan options are also accommodating to Muslims who keep halal. But increasingly, halal pepperoni, steak, and wings are available to Chicagoland Muslims as higher-end meat-producers, like Creekstone Farms and Demkota Ranch Beef, are becoming halal-certified. Often, a restaurant won’t advertise that its steak or chicken is halal and it’s up to the consumer to know what questions to ask about meat sourcing. These higher-end beef options are also making their way into chains, like Epic Burger and Dog Haus. It’s also about a growing number of Muslim restauranteurs knowing the Muslim and greater Chicago markets and introducing halal meat to their burger and taco joints. Below, find the most unexpected halal food Chicago has to offer, from the city’s classic thin-crust pizza with pepperoni to the gyro, as well as high-end steaks.

    As of August 20, the city has mandated that everyone wear facial coverings while indoors. For updated information on coronavirus cases, please visit the city of Chicago’s COVID-19 dashboard. Health experts consider dining out to be a high-risk activity for the unvaccinated; the latest data about the delta variant indicates that it may pose a low-to-moderate risk for the vaccinated, especially in areas with substantial transmission. The latest CDC guidance is here; find a COVID-19 vaccination site here.

    Read More

    Eater maps are curated by editors and aim to reflect a diversity of neighborhoods, cuisines, and prices. Learn more about our editorial process.

    If you buy something or book a reservation from an Eater link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics policy.

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    N.A. Mansour

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  • Cloudfare lava lamp room

    Cloudfare lava lamp room

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    For those who don’t know, Cloudfare encrypts their data using the randomness of a lava lamp. “To produce the unpredictable, chaotic data necessary for strong encryption, a computer must have a source of random data. The “real world” turns out to be a great source for randomness, because events in the physical world are unpredictable.”

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  • A Very Necessary FAQ for Jennifer Lopez’s ‘This Is Me … Now: A Love Story’

    A Very Necessary FAQ for Jennifer Lopez’s ‘This Is Me … Now: A Love Story’

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    You may have heard that Jennifer Lopez made her own autobiographical version of Cloud Atlas where she journeys through time and space to heal her heart through the redemptive power of self-love and flower petals. You may have heard that her journey includes a steampunk Flashdance homage and a Ben Affleck jump scare and that Jane Fonda leads a sort of Greek-chorus-meets–Inside Out think tank of celestial beings. And those rumors (all true) may have stirred up some questions in your soul like: why, how, who, and huh? But perhaps most importantly: What on Jane Fonda’s green earth did we do to deserve such a thing?

    Now, the tone with which you ask that last question might depend on how you typically respond to the artistic stylings of one Jennifer Lynn Lopez. Do you see her as a visionary? A Hollywood septuple threat? An artist constantly reinventing herself? A star who’s outkicked her talent coverage but continues to iterate on a public persona that’s never been particularly convincing as a contemporary auteur?

    Nah, not that last one—this movie rules. It is singularly weird, and should be treated as such!

    This Is Me … Now: A Love Story (huge win for punctuation) makes not a lick of narrative sense, and yet it is a masterpiece—as long as the barometer for what constitutes a masterpiece is “being extremely Jennifer Lopez.” One thing I’ve always respected about J.Lo is that she is going to sell you J.Lo, whether you meant to walk into the J.Lo shop or not. Was anyone expecting a sequel to her 2002 album This Is Me … Then 22 years later? Certainly not. (Except maybe J.Lo—why else would she name her album that in the first place?) Was anyone demanding that J.Lo make a visual album? I don’t think so. (Except, again, J.Lo, who is never not saying, “I guess I’ll just have to DO IT myself,” about an artistic endeavor that is entirely and wholly about … herself.) But then Jennifer Lopez reunited with Ben Affleck, the man she dedicated This Is Me … Then to in 2002, called things off with three days before their planned wedding, then got back together with and ultimately married 20 years later. Such a reunion deserved something more than just a sequel album.

    Screenshots via Prime Video

    So, from the heart/soul/dreams of Jennifer Lopez comes a 55-minute-long narrative musical that Amazon paid to distribute, once again dedicated to the epic love she and Ben Affleck share. In one sense, This Is Me … Now: A Love Story is a visual album for This Is Me … Now, which also dropped on February 16. In every other sense, however, J.Lo has made a 55-minute movie about a Leo learning to love herself while singing and dancing her way through two decades of romantic misadventures. It is the most Jennifer Lopez thing Jennifer Lopez has ever done in a career that has always been fully devoted to performing at max Jennifer Lopez. It is the ultimate continuation of J.Lo telling what she sees as her hero’s journey: a mission to be understood by a society that has been inaccurately consuming her artistry and personal life for nearly three decades …

    Casting yourself as the underdog with a self-funded budget of $20 million? Iconic behavior. There is no other celebrity this insistent upon reminding us that she is an artist. To be fair, though, I’ve never seen art quite like This Is Me … Now: A Love Story. It is as if Michael Scott was given an eight-figure budget to make Threat Level Midnight, or if The Room was created by a legion of astrology-obsessed musical theater nerds instead of Tommy Wiseau. Like those films, This Is Me … Now is pure camp most especially because of its creator’s sincere belief in its artistic significance. J.Lo is the FUBU of pop stars—everything she makes is for Jennifer Lopez, by Jennifer Lopez—and this celestial steampunk odyssey is no different.

    I believe that Jennifer Lopez loves these 55 minutes of musical cinema she’s created, and that’s enough for me. But for anyone who’s not Jennifer Lopez, you may have some questions about the facts and figures of This Is Me … Now: A Love Story. The movie will not tell you outright why Jennifer Lopez’s robot heart is powered by flower petals, or why her character exclusively resides in terrifying futuristic homes made entirely of glass—so I’m here today to answer some common questions that may arise regarding everyone’s favorite new movie featuring both ellipses and a colon in the title.

    Is this a musical? A movie? A musical movie? A movie musical?

    Stunningly, This Is Me … Now: A Love Story is yet another entry into this year’s canon of films that don’t fully spell out that they’re musicals in their trailers. Sure, the This Is Me … Now trailer was scored by Jennifer Lopez’s “This Is Me … Now” song. But I kind of just assumed the movie would be that: scored. But no, Jennifer Lopez is breaking into song and dance at all times in this movie. That makes it a musical.

    From the trailer, I’d also assumed this would be a feature-length film. But, again, no! It is a 55-minute movie that according to J.Lo should not be classified as a music video, yet it also isn’t nearly long enough to be feature length. So what is it? The trailer tells us it’s a “new INTIMATE, CINEMATIC, MUSICAL experience,” and you know what? I agree: Jennifer Lopez’s first self-written, self-funded, and self-starring creation certainly is a “new … experience.”

    Does J.Lo play herself in this musical movie?

    Let’s be absolutely clear: This Is Me … Now is autofiction. In the opening scene, we see Jennifer Lopez on the back of a motorcycle with a man who looks a lot like Ben Affleck (played, in silhouette, by Ben Affleck), which then crashes while traversing a lake, signifying the greatest heartbreak of her life. In the narrative of the film, J.Lo is reunited with that man once more after 10 years, three divorces, and a journey through time and song to find love with the most important person in her life: herself. These are not the precise details of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s sprawling love story, but they’re close …

    And yet, Jennifer Lopez’s character isn’t called Jennifer Lopez. She’s called “the Artist.” We only actually learn that from the movie’s closed captioning (“[The Artist laughs]”), as the movie works very hard to never call the character by a name—y’know, like Fleabag, if Fleabag was always doing intricate chest choreography instead of speaking directly to camera.

    There are certainly indicators that the Artist is supposed to be world famous like J.Lo, but we learn absolutely nothing beyond the fact that she is permanently unlucky in love. “I know what they say about me, about hopeless romantics, that we’re weak,” the Artist says in one of her many monologues to her therapist. “But I’m not weak. It takes strength to keep believing in something after you keep falling flat on your face.” Some might also say it takes strength to produce nine studio albums and over 30 feature films and co-headline the Super Bowl … but that’s a story for a different for-J.Lo-by-J.Lo production. (It’s called Halftime, and she already made it, obviously.)

    This movie is about love and love only. Ultimately, the Artist’s monologue ends with the line, “I believe in soulmates and signs and hummingbirds.” Because her name is the Artist, not the Writer.

    OK then, so is Ben Affleck in this movie?

    Ben Affleck … is in this movie. The entire point of the movie, after all, is that every mistake J.Lo has ever made in her life—every liquor-swilling boyfriend who’s ever broken any one of her metaphorical and also quite literal (in this movie) glass houses—has been leading back to Ben Affleck. So, obviously … in this movie … Affleck plays a TV commentator named Rex Stone, wearing a Donald Trump wig and a Mrs. Doubtfire prosthetic nose, and also occasionally proselytizing the news in the background of scenes. This character makes exactly no sense, but in one scene he does manage to deliver the film’s entire thesis statement when he says, “In 2012, the no. 1 question people asked was, ‘What is love?’”

    Sorry, what people? Asked who? Why is 2012 the reference point here? The answer to all of those questions is: It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters in the world is love. And if you’re wondering what the “top questions” people ask now are, according to Rex Stone, they’re: “Where my refund? Why women kill? Will I get laid? Is Europe a country? How I screenshot a Mac? Am I preg-erant? And why my poop green?”

    It’s the funniest sequence of the movie, and I would bet my On the J.Lo newsletter subscription that Ben Affleck wrote that little diddy himself.

    So how does this movie communicate a complicated timeline that spans 20 years, three divorces, and multiple time jump dream sequences?

    In a word: bangs. Anytime we cut to J.Lo and she has bangs, we are in the present. Anytime she doesn’t have bangs, she is either in the past, in a dream, or in some version of the present (recent past) that she’s relaying to her therapist.

    J.Lo’s bangs are as critical to the plot of This Is Me … Now as the robot heart that’s powering the Artist’s metaphysical world (more on that in a minute). But because J.Lo is eternally ageless, at times we also have to rely on a basset hound puppy aging into an elder basset hound to understand that J.Lo has spent the last decade or so growing, healing, and preparing her heart to love Ben Affleck again.

    What inspired Jennifer Lopez to make this movie?

    Other than Ben Affleck, I have several theories: moments that occurred throughout the film that made me think, “This line/scene/image has clearly been rattling around in Jennifer Lopez’s head for a decade, so she decided to create an entire $20 million passion project around it.” They are as follows:

    • When she says to one of her future ex-husbands (played by the famously blond adult male Derek Hough), “You feel like home to me … but I left home for a reason.” J.Lo loves this line, you can just tell.
    • The movie opens with a million AI-rendered images of Jennifer Lopez depicted within the Puerto Rican folktale of Alida and Taroo … and I just know that Jennifer Lopez got one look at herself as a Greek goddess or a space explorer in December 2022 and thought, “I HAVE to get this imagery to the people.”
    • J.Lo learned a lot about astrology at some point, it made her realize a bunch of stuff about herself (classic Leo), and she decided to spend $20 million relaying that information to the public.
    • J.Lo did inner child work with a therapist. Quite literally, there is a dream sequence in this movie in which J.Lo apologizes to her younger self on the dark and dirty streets of the Bronx, and once she does, the sun comes out, and both J.Los break into song. Of course, we know it’s a dream sequence because the Artist is relaying it to her therapist, Fat Joe.

    Is Fat Joe a licensed therapist?

    From what I can tell, no. But he does wear a full beige outfit with all the confidence and gravitas of your richest aunt, so he’s at least believable as a therapist. Also believable? That J.Lo would try to pry personal details out of her therapist in order to bond. (“You’re such a Taurus. What sign is your wife?”)

    You said we’d get back to this: Why is Jennifer Lopez’s heart powered by flower petals?

    Right. After the Artist crashes on the motorcycle, signaling the greatest heartbreak of her life, we’re taken inside the Heart Factory, where an oiled-up and tank-topped Jennifer Lopez is yelling, “It’s gonna break!” I don’t know how to convince you that I’m not lying to you about the events of a J.Lo musical, but I promise I am not. There is a giant metal heart pulsing above the factory workers which has apparently reached “critical petal levels.”

    That’s right. Jennifer Lopez’s heart is powered by flower petals, and the only way to save it is for Jennifer Lopez to get in a jumpsuit, walk a gangplank out to the heart, journey inside its destructing valves, and start feeding rose petals to the dwindling fire that powers it while simultaneously breaking into the song “Hearts and Flowers” (get it???) with the rest of the workers down on the factory/dance floor.

    It’s not until a little later in the movie that we learn this was a dream sequence (no bangs—I should have caught it), and much later in the movie, we see the petal levels stabilize enough to repair the broken heart. So yeah, Jennifer Lopez is basically just Being John Malkovich–ing inside her own heart for like 20 years (well … earth years, robot-heart years may be measured differently), trying to save herself so she can marry Ben Affleck.

    You’re telling me Jennifer Lopez’s Ben Affleck movie stages an elaborate reference to Armageddon?

    That’s exactly what I’m telling you.

    Are there any other dream sequences in this movie?

    I’m pretty sure that any scene that doesn’t happen directly in the presence of Fat Joe himself is a dream sequence, or at the very least a recounting of a dream or memory by the Artist to her therapist, which, again, is Fat Joe. These include, but are not limited to: the aforementioned heart factory, a love addiction intervention, the shattering of a glass home via physical abuse, watching a healing round of The Way We Were on a custom monogrammed Gucci-esque couch, and, of course, a Singin’ in the Rain homage. So you might be wondering …

    Is there a wedding montage in this movie?

    Oh yeah, you betcha. And it’s amazing. The Artist married three men across 10 years, one song (“To Be Yours”), and several wedding dresses. The first wedding dress features two heart-shaped mesh cutouts that perfectly frame J.Lo’s crotch. Romance!

    Perhaps more unexpected, however, is the couples therapy montage, wherein all three husbands sit in front of Fat Joe alongside the Artist (this feels like a psychiatric moral gray area, Fat Joe). Dialogue selections include: “I’m a piece of art in her collection,” and, “I feel like I’m just another thing in her house.”

    What I wouldn’t give to be a Gucci-monogrammed sectional in J.Lo’s house! But ultimately, the Artist grows tired of all of these uninspiring men, leaves them behind in their own futuristic houses, and starts fucking around with a bunch of dummies. Her friends are forced to give her an intervention, and Fat Joe recommends joining Love Addicts Anonymous …

    Is Love Addicts Anonymous a real thing?

    Technically it’s called “Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous,” but yes, it is indeed a real 12-step program (though J.Lo makes sure to clarify that she is not a sex addict in her autofictional musical movie). At J.Lo’s Love Addicts Anonymous meetings, you’re led by veteran character actor Paul Raci, and you express yourself exclusively through modern dance.

    A particularly rich piece of dialogue comes when Paul Raci tells the Artist, after her impromptu performance of “Broken Like Me,” that “I know you feel like no one gets you.” To which Jennifer Lopez—a woman who is in the middle of making an hour-long music video about herself—responds: “I don’t even get me.”

    But that was J.Lo … then. And this is J.Lo … now. And this J.Lo … has read her birth chart.

    Do you need to have a casual understanding of astrology to understand this movie?

    It would certainly help! Even though the movie starts with a Puerto Rican folk tale that continues to proliferate through the movie in the form of a hummingbird (bet you didn’t see a J.Lo neck tattoo coming!), we’re really expected to come in with our own knowledge of the zodiac.

    Bare minimum, knowing at least a little about all 12 astrological signs will really help color in the Zodiacal Council when it shows up …

    What is a Zodiacal Council?

    Oh, well it’s a collection of humanoid representations of the 12 star signs who watch over the Artist from the heavens as she fumbles her love life. They are exposition machines who say things like, “She’s smart, she’s beautiful, and she seems so strong—why does she always need to be with somebody?!” But most importantly, they are played by the likes of Keke Palmer (Scorpio), Trevor Noah (Libra), Post Malone (Leo), Sofia Vergara (Cancer), Jenifer Lewis (Gemini), and Neil deGrasse Tyson (Taurus), and, as aforementioned, they are led by Jane Fonda the Sagittarius. (Congratulations to all Sagittariuses for this iconic Monster in Law representation—and apologies to Aquariuses and Capricorns, who are straight up not represented on the Cameo Council.)

    If you’re otherwise not a huge Jennifer Lopez fan, the Zodiacal Council scenes are pretty much the main reason to watch This Is Me … Now. It feels like a Super Bowl commercial in that none of these people ever filmed in the same room together, the narrative structure remains extremely thin throughout, a new person pops up with each new scene (hey look, it’s Jay Shetty!), and Post Malone is there, always seeming like he’s on the verge of performatively eating a bag of Doritos.

    So did Jennifer Lopez make an hour-long, $20 million music video about being a Leo?

    According to everything I learned about astrology from This Is Me … Now: A Love Story—yeah, she did. Leos are confident and assertive. Leos are enthusiastic, creative, and more self-conscious than you think. Leos are, above all else, hopeless romantics (at least according to my favorite Leo, Jennifer Lopez). And not only is Jennifer Lopez a Leo … she reunited with another Leo at the end of this movie whom she will eventually fall back in love with, marry, write an album about, and create an hour-long, absolutely bonkers, beautiful, gorgeous, perfect musical movie to accompany that album about …

    And in a few weeks, This Is Me … Now: A Love Story will be followed up with The Greatest Love Story Never Told, a documentary about the making of this musical movie.

    To drop a documentary about the musical you created about the album you wrote about your love story that the world has been consuming for over two decades, and to then call it “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” well, I’m just gonna say it: classic Leo. Never change, Jennifer Lopez. And if you do, please make a musical about it.

    But did you cry during This Is Me … Now: A Love Story?

    So kind of you to ask, and yes, of course I did. The Artist healed her own heart through the power of time and Flashdance. She learned to love herself first in order to truly love another. She went back in time and space and told her 8-year-old self that she’s sorry and she loves her. She found Ben Affleck again on a beach in front of a giant, unexplained sand statue straight out of Game of Thrones.

    I’m not a monster, I’m just a Taurus.

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    Jodi Walker

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