The 234 Apartment

We make no presumptions about why you’re seeking our help today: maybe you’re here because you accidentally followed Mike Pence on Twitter for a few minutes and you’re feeling unclean. Maybe your uncle Ralph shared a misspelled update on your Facebook wall last week warning about contamination at a fishing hole back home in Indiana and a couple of your friends liked it. Maybe you’re just feeling generally insecure about your life ever since you found out that the exposed brick in your new apartment wasn’t original to the building. Whatever the circumstances, you’re here because you’re an urban professional below forty with an income north of six figures and a STOP KEYSTONE XL bumper sticker on your rarely-used road bike, you’re insecure about your social status, and you want to remind your family, friend, and coworkers of your place in the world. With that in mind, may we humbly suggest that you use social media to share a short, wryly funny humor piece from a respected national...

click to enlarge I can’t remember exactly when I started at the Riverfront Times , but it was a long time ago — the web site was a .PDF of the paper that was uploaded on Wednesday morning . I can say that I’ve lived or worked (sometimes both) in the Loop since Bill Clinton was in the White House. I've been coming down here for films, books, meals and weird people watching since the late ‘80s, back when gangs of feral kids camped out in the street- level parking lot across from the Tivoli. The stretch of Delmar between the St. Louis Noodle Cafe and the University City Public Library has been my psycho-geographical concept of St. Louis for more than half my life. But now I'm in the process of packing up my office in preparation for a move. This afternoon, the RFT is leaving our home of 21 years on Delmar. By tomorrow, the paper will be based in Downtown West, and so will I, at least during office hours. Goodbye to all that. We’re only the latest business to say that...

CLOSE Robert St. John has learned a lot in the restaurant business. Such as: Never store butane in an oven. Robert St. John/Special to The Clarion-Ledger Wagyu Beef with long grain rice , cashew, okra, benne seeds at Coquette. (Photo: Special to The Clarion-Ledger) The following is the third in a four-installment summer- column series covering my top 10 dining experiences for breakfast, lunch, dinner and brunch in New Orleans. There are a few items to note: This list purely subjective . Everyone has varying tastes and preferences. This is not a ranking of overall quality from a critical/review standpoint. This is my personal list. These are my personal favorites. Everyone has personal connections to restaurants. These happen to be mine. According to the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, there are more than 1,400 restaurants operating in New Orleans today. That’s an impressive number for a city with a population of only 390,000. There are obviously hundreds of restaurants I...

The best restaurant cookbooks are like time capsules, preserving a moment, a feeling. That’s what this year’s stack of restaurant- focused books achieves — with variable levels of success. Don’t miss chef Wylie Dufresne ’s look back at wd~50 or the new two-volume set from NYC’s highly lauded experiential dining room Eleven Madison Park . Casual restaurants, from the Publican in Chicago to Juhu Beach Club in Oakland, also got the book treatment this year. Each collection stands alone as a testament to the hard work of a team pushing for one pristine goal. Cheers to the Publican: Recipes and Ramblings from an American Beer Hall Paul Kahan, Cosmo Goss, Rachel Holtzman Lorena Jones Books, September 19 Starting with the first time I ate at there, shortly after its opening in 2008, the Publican has been my favorite restaurant. It was an instantaneous love — the room, the food, a swirling feeling of commensality and broad-shouldered abundance. So for me, the promise of this book, Cheers t...

When Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York City in 2014, he made no secret of his intent to place affordable housing at the center of his term. Not long after his election, he rolled out his Housing New York plan–a 10-year strategy to build or preserve around 200,000 affordable units across the city’s five boroughs. advertisement Affordable, when it comes to housing in New York, is a slippery term. Critics of de Blasio’s plan have pointed out that the majority of the units built or converted under Housing New York remain out of reach of low-income New Yorkers–those earning less than $43,000 per year. And while the plan has succeeded making a nearly 100,000 unit dent in the city’s 550,000 affordable-unit shortfall, the terms of the new unit’s affordability are ephemeral: The majority of the units created and preserved under the mayor’s plan are only regulated temporarily, often for as little as two decades. There is no guarantee that a unit designated as affordable today will remain...