"chicago" news and stories

Community service has gone to the birds. Or, for some critics, at least the Chicago legal system has after a judge told a defendant he could either do 100 hours community service or bring him some jerk chicken.

When Darrius Logan plead guilty to misdemeanor battery and criminal trespass charges in August, he told Associate Judge Robert Livas that he'd already worked 100 unpaid "community service" hours at Uncle Joe's Jerk Chicken, a South Side Chicago Jamaican restaurant chain. The judge told him to come back in two months with proof he'd completed the community service elsewhere or to bring back enough chicken to feed the court room, the Chicago Tribune reports.

"If you walk in with enough chicken to feed everybody, I'll accept these community service hours," Livas said, according to court transcripts from Aug. 4 obtained by the Tribune. "If you don't, I'm not taking any of them."

A famous Chicago nightclub is facing allegations of racial discrimination after claiming to ban African-American students for violating the dress code while white students wearing the same type of clothing were let inside, CNN.com reports.

Six African-American students from Washington University in St. Louis were allegedly kept outside Original Mother's Bar for violating the dress code -- for wearing baggy jeans -- while hundreds of their white classmates were let in, in one case wearing the very same jeans,

Mother's Bar personnel said the excluded students violated the dress code by wearing baggy jeans, Washington University senior class president Fernando Cutz told CNN.com, but when a white student and a black student swapped jeans and tried to get in, the white student was let through while his black classmate was still banned.

The students filed complaints with the Chicago Human Rights Commission, the Illinois Attorney General, the U.S. Department of Justice and other groups.

Original Mother's bar did not return calls from CNN.

[Via CNN.com]

McDonald's at Chicago's Navy Pier. Photo: jwrb,Flickr.

A Chicago man has filed a lawsuit against McDonald's Corporation after he says he swallowed a gold earring in his sandwich.

The man purchased the sandwich on Aug. 11 from the McDonald's at Chicago's Navy Pier, according to the suit filed on Wednesday in the circuit court of Cook County, Ill.

Juicy burger. Photo: wEnDiLicious/Flickr

Can a daily dose of chopped beef really make you stupid?

That's what one Chicago food writer claims, after eating burgers for 65 days straight for Chicago Magazine. "The onslaught of red meat did what drugs and alcohol and fatherhood could not: It made me stupid," Jeff Ruby writes in a humorous piece entitled "Burgers Made Me Dumb."

Ruby chalks up the bouts of stupidity with "a mild case of cognitive dysfunction syndrome. CDS (aka brain fog)."

But can a burger really lower your IQ?

Doug Sohn, owner of Hot Doug's. Photo: William Couch/ Flickr.

Frankfurter maestro Doug Sohn, the man behind the beloved Chicago eatery Hot Doug's, is a stickler for putting the same care into his hot dog toppings that a top chef would a béarnaise sauce.

"Whatever you pair, you want it to taste good," he says. "We caramelize our onions in real butter. We get the freshest tomatoes."

Sohn is a trained chef who bypassed life in a haute restaurant to grill haute dogs. He's been on the wiener beat for nearly a decade, and remains an undeterred champion of foie gras in the wake of a since-overturned Chicago-wide ban. His sought-after pups feature tantalizing names like the "mighty hot" Keira Knightley and the "mighty, might, mighty hot!" Salma Hayek andouille sausage.

With grills heating up for the Fourth of July, here are Sohn's thoughts on how to spruce up that old dog.

Sohn on bringing his own dogs to Cubs games and the awesomeness of foie gras franks after the jump.