Notes from Chicago

What does a longtime Chicago restaurant critic actually eat when nobody’s assigning the story? This week, Ashley sits down with Maggie Hennessy, a freelance food journalist, former Time Out Chicago restaurant critic, and author of The Burger Bible: Everything You Need to Know About the Humble Hamburger. Maggie left a financial journalism job covering hedge funds at Reuters for night classes at culinary school, and she’s covered Chicago’s food scene ever since. Follow Maggie Hennessy: * Instagr

Jean Cate is a Chicago artist and the owner of Martha Mae: Art Supplies & Beautiful Things and The Center of Order and Experimentation, a coffee and gift shop on Grand Avenue in West Town. In this episode of Notes from Chicago, she tells Ashley how she opened her first shop in Andersonville while still at SAIC and rebuilt it after the original concept failed. She also explains how running that shop pulled her through severe anxiety, and why she believes shops can be a container for connection.

At 29, Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann was living in Los Angeles when the idea of building the synagogue she actually wanted to go to pulled her back to Chicago. Host Ashley talks with Rabbi Lizzi, Senior Rabbi and Founder of Mishkan Chicago, about growing up in Hyde Park, the South Side synagogue that shaped her, and why she set out to build a community for young adults who said, "Why would we go to synagogue?" She shares how Mishkan went from a Honda Civic full of speakers to a 19-person staff, a reli

Jane Beachy calls Chicago "the fountain of youth," a city where new ideas are always being born. She would know. As founder of Salonathon, the beloved weekly salon that ran from 2011 to 2018, she gave hundreds of Chicago artists a stage to share things they'd made just for that night, or had been quietly working on for years. Ashley talks with Jane, Senior Director of Public Engagement at Illinois Humanities, about why she chose to end Salonathon at its peak and what it taught her about "the se

This week on Notes from Chicago, we're at the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance with President & CEO Jennifer Van Valkenburg. Jen breaks down what it actually means to run one of the three largest conservatories in the country, from the 30-year public-private partnership with the Chicago Park District, to the community advisory board and youth council that shape every decision, to why they retired a beloved event (RIP Beer Under Glass) in favor of programming built with, not just for, the neig

Mark Payne has spent his career developing Chicago's next generation of civic leaders, and he learned to do it the same way he learned to love the city: from his family. His father, Jimmy Payne, was a celebrated Afro-Cuban and tap dancer who taught dance in Chicago from 1947 into his 90s; his mother drove the family up and down King Drive telling stories of the Great Migration. That upbringing in Bronzeville, Englewood, and Auburn Gresham shaped Mark into a Public Allies alum himself, and today