As a humble reminder, we’re out at a conference this week. We’ll be back the week of May 19.

Loaf Lounge is the sort of place where there should be more of it, more like it, but the work is probably terrible and the rent is probably bad and Loaf Lounge made most of its reputation off of The Bear, Chicago’s only cultural work. Loaf Lounge is a café that makes good sandwiches and better pastry, and their coffee is highly underrated since they use the best commercial roastery in the metro area, but everybody knows them for the cake, now called the Bear Cake, which is not made of bear but of chocolate. The show needed a cake; the owners consulted on it; they parlayed that success into a literal brick-and-mortar café that is less than 100 feet from my house, where the whole staff knows me, smirks when I walk in.