Your article convinced me to try this place! Sounds healthy, delicious and high quality. Any chef baking his own bread is committed to superb food. I checked out the menu on Juno's website and it amazed me how they can serve such a diverse menu in a tiny space - gotta check this one out! All the reviews on Yelp are positive - so this seems like a jewel of a teeny cafe....sounds like it's best for take out since it is so small, but every single review here and on Yelp says the food is superb.

My personal experience with SHRA is they are an inept, bumbling, bloated"Pork Project" agency that has contempt for the clients they are paid to help. Several years ago I used to live in a HUD apt building and the landlord refused to make basic repairs which violated health code such as non-functioning toilet, roof caving in, infested with bugs, etc. SHRA was paid to "supervise" the HUD contract with the landlord but never did anything. Every time I called SHRA they treated me like I was a welfare moocher or drug addict. I was a disabled senior - not a junkie welfare hippie! When I explained to SHRA that I was a good tenant who just wanted a habitable place to live, they told me I should feel lucky I wasn't living in a tent down by the river and I should just shut up. I gave up on SHRA to get the repairs done in my apt - and contacted the Health and Building Code inspector who wrote citations to my landlord - "fix it tickets" - that finally solved my problem. A friend of mine who is a disabled senior citizen tried to liase with SHRA in order to move from one HUD apt bldg to a different HUD apt bldg. She had a portable voucher - so it is quite simple in terms of paperwork to transfer from one apt bldg to a different HUD apt bldg with a portable voucher. The only thing SHRA needed to do was complete 2 pages to calculate what her new rent would be. Actually, she was going to be paying the SAME rent - since it is based on income and her Social Security benefits which was the same amount for a year. The paperwork should have been completed in less than a week - it wasn't that big of a deal - just a formality because the amount of her rent was going to remain the same....but SHRA was so disorganized and discombobulated it took several months to straighten out. My friend told me she spent several hours one day sitting in the lobby of SHRA and demanded they fix her paperwork so she could move to a different HUD apt bldg. Finally a supervisor came out to assist her - my friend and the supervisor sat down at a table together and went over the paperwork. The supervisor went through the file and admitted to my friend that 90% of the her file had been mismanaged - that all the paperwork was filled out wrong - pages which did not belong together were stapled together. Even other clients paperwork somehow wound up in her file by mistake! The two of them worked on the file for about 5 hours together - and finally got it fixed. But in order to get that accomplished - my friend literally had to do a "Sit In" strike in the lobby of SHRA and spend almost one day with the staff. She said she wouldn't leave unless they fixed her file - even if it meant getting arrested at 5pm when the office closed! It shouldn't take that much effort to do simple paperwork. If SHRA loses funding and closes it would be a good thing. For years I've heard that many of the apt bldgs they run are slum type conditions. I also spoke with many community organizers who work on afffordable housing issues who told me there was plenty of graft, corruption and mismanagement of funding at SHRA. I believe them - when an Oak Park slum lord - Art Ballard who owned what used to be the Woodruff SRO apt bldg burnt down due to faulty electrical wiring, in the mid-1990's - a tenant died in a fire when the building almost burn down completely. Art Ballard was a notorious slum lord in Oak Park for years. He should have gone to jail for manslaughter - the building burning down was 100% due to fried faulty electrical wiring. Instead, SHRA gave Art Ballard a known slum lord a low interest loan to remodel the Woodruff. The bldg was never brought up to code - Art Ballard just had some contractors make superficial cosmetic improvements on the surface to make it look like it had been repaired and he kept a lot of the redevelopment money for himself - not remodelling the building. Eventually, the IRS took slumlord Art Ballard to court because he didn't pay his taxes for years - he lost the Woodruff Bldg and also the Guild Theatre - the IRS took all his assets and Art Ballard lost his shirt. Why did SHRA award a known slum lord with very low interest loans when his SRO burnt down due to faulty wiring - and some tenants died in that fire? I am sure there are some very good and decent redevelopment agencies - but due to chronic abuse - I think there era is over. If SHRA goes out of business - it was their own fault from mismanaged projects.

I agree! My 75 year old mother recently had a cartoid artery bypass operation. Her artery in her heart was so full of rock hard plaque it was impossible to scrape out all the hardening of that artery. The surgeon had to take out a vein in her leg from her groin (where the leg meets the hip) all the way down to her ankle and use that to replace the artery in her heart which was rock hard full of calcified plaque. My mother spent a week in the hospital. The surgery was over one month ago. Tomorrow my mother is going back to the hospital to have over 100 metal staples removed from her leg where the surgery was. She told me the pain is so bad, she doesn't want to go on living. Evidentially, doctors cannot do effective pain management and she is in living hell. All four of my grandparents died of heart disease - 5 of my aunts and uncles had strokes - so cardiovascular disease runs in my family. I don't think giving up and saying "I have bad genes" is an excuse to eat high cholesterol food. I am middle aged and have very low cholesterol and good blood pressure because since I was a teenager I deliberately made an attempt to eat organic food and a whole foods diet. We are not the victims of our DNA gene code. Even hereditary factors can be turned around with good lifestyle practices. I am always happy to see a new, family owned, small business open in such a bad economy because it creates a job for someone, it creates sales tax which helps our municipal treasury.....I am not going to be eating at Squeeze Inn unless they create just ONE healthy menu item. I am not vegan and not a vegetarian but I am health conscious and try to choose wisely with what type of food I eat. Eating a cheese drenched burger once every month or two won't give a person cancer or heart disease - but a steady diet of this type of food is a one way ticket to the heart attack ward! Soda pop is even worse than animal fat - soda pop is made from high fructose corn syrup - the main ingredient of HFCS is GMO genetically engineered corn, drenched in pesticides, fungicides and herbicides. The Garlic Shack opened and closed in about two months - the menu was all deep fried, fat soaked stuff - now it is a Mongolian place with more high fat, meat based menu. I know there is a client base who wants to eat at healthy cafe's - I just wish entrepeneurs would understand this and open someplace HEALTHY to eat downtown or midtown. I am totally burnt out eating at Chipolte, Hot Italian and Sugar Plum Vegan and wish there was someplace else to eat. They are all very good restaurants with organic food and healthy menu items - but I think I've eaten at all three places a zillion trillion times and would appreciate a new alternative. Andy Nguyen's is pretty good - except the entire menu has wheat gluten and soy based ingredients in every dish - I'm allergic to gluten and soy so I have to always ask the waiter to substitute ingredients. I tried Loving Hut but don't think it is very healthy - they sell Coca Cola and lots of white, refined carbs - although there is a brown rice option. I tried Freshii once and didn't go back - sort of semi-healthy fast food - but not really that healthy - although certainly better than McDonalds. Now about those Gardenburgers - really they are just frozen hockey pucks of GMO genetically engineered soy beans - Gardenburger uses hexane as a solvent to separate the soy bean protein from the soy oil. Hexane is banned in food use in many countries since it is known to be a neurotixin endrocrine disruptor and cause cancer. I agree with everything in Michellefromhermac's post - but that grass fed organic beef is around $9 a pound - so I don't eat it. There is a lot of hype with the organic beef industry - most of the ranchers do indeed feed their livestock grass for PART of the time - but companies like Harris Ranch and Coleman Ranch fatten the cows up with non-organic grain the last couple of months of the life of the cow in order to fatten up the animal - and get marbling in the beef. It is the marbeling that has all the cholesterol. Grass fed for awhile then "finishing the cow off" with grain is the norm for organic beef. Environmental Working Group has info on their website that shows how organic grass fed lamb is actually higher in cholesterol and fat than grass fed beef! Organic lamb also has a higher environmental carbon footprint than organic beef. Good luck to Squeeze Inn - I wish them well - but I won't be a patron - i looked at their online menu and there is not even ONE healthy thing to eat. Even just one veggie stir fry dish would be nice - or a veggie burger made from scratch from whole grains and beans, seeds on a whole grain bun with veggies would be terrific. We need a restraunt to open that understands how to honor the noble vegetale!

Great article - I enjoyed reading it - all the murals are spectacular - except the very first mural with the bleedling decapitated head of a primate almost made me lose my lunch....surprised the PETA people aren't picketing against animal cruelty in front of that mural. Public murals - outdoor sculpture are a great method of civic enhancment - next to community gardens - public art is my fave beautification project for urban areas.

I agree with DaveL - I winced when I read that comment about making a contribution to the API community by marrying an Asian American woman. That is like saying "I am not racist because I enjoy eating ethnic food".....or "some of my best friends are Jewish".....what a bonehead comment by the Mayor. If I hear yet another rambling speech about his boyhood days in Oak Park, I will set my hair on fire. My family has lived in Sacramento since the 1950's but that isn't qualification to be Mayor. Kevin Johnson has been office for 3 years and still we have low reading scores in our public schools - but he seems to think by marrying a woman who used to work in education that is going to do the trick? Sort of along the lines of marrying an Asian American woman so that is his contribution to the API community? For the most part - he's always full of excuses and promises. The primary focus of his election promises was to improve our schools and nail the stadium deal. Three years later, no progress has been made - he seems obsessed with the Strong Mayor proposal. It already failed twice and he still is trying to foist it on us again. I suppose by the end of his term and he is running for re election the Mayor will rationalize that he could not accomplish his goals because he was denied the powers of the Strong Mayor scheme!