A new restaurant at the Tribune Tower called Howells & Hood just opened on Chicago’s busy and famed Magnificent Mile. It’s the latest venture from Chicago-based Bottleneck Management, owned and operated by three former Illinois Wesleyan students, Titan football players and fraternity brothers: Chris Bisaillon ’93, Jason Akemann ’96 and Nate Hilding ’96.  Howells & Hood takes its name from the the Tribune Tower’s history – paying homage to the building’s original architects, John Howells and Raymond Hood.  The restaurant officially opened on March 14th, 2013.

Howells & Hood’s Executive Chef Scott Walton and Bottleneck’s Corporate Executive Chef Paul Katz have collaborated on a menu that offers globally-inspired cuisine with locally-sourced product, capitalizing on Walton’s reputation as one of Chicago’s foremost authorities on fresh and sustainable cuisine.

This marks the sixth location for Bottleneck Management, following other bars and restaurants that they’ve opened throughout the city including Trace, The Boundary Tavern, Sweetwater Tavern and Grille, South Branch Tavern and Grille, and, most recently, Old Town Pour House.  For more information about Howells & Hood, visit their website at HowellsAndHood.com.

Prof. Fred Hoyt joins Prof. Elisabeta Pana and students in a Business Administration travel course focused on the 27-member European Union. They will visit the EU headquarters in Brussels, London (which is in the European Union but does not use the Euro), Euro-saviors Berlin and Paris, troubled Athens, and potential member Turkey’s Istanbul, among others.

The group had a meal facilitated by an IWU alum, George Kambouroglou ’93, who works as a software supervisor at the EU.  We’ve been in touch with George as soon as we learned he was in Brussels, and he bent over backward to make sure we had as much information as he could find, and joined us for dinner last night at Café Leon to reminisce about his days as an Acacia/physics major at IWU.