You might notice that our Best of the Quad Cities looks a little different this year.
For one thing, in the interest of making the ballot less intimidating, we broke up voting into two parts: winter and summer. This also allows us, over the course of both rounds, to write about more winners.
This Best of the Quad Cities issue covers only the categories of Food & Dining, Civics & Government, Media, and Recreation. The summer balloting will cover Arts & Entertainment, Night Life, Shopping, and People and will begin in June, with publication in September.
You might also notice some new winners in major categories. For example, our new "best restaurant" is the Faithful Pilot, which has always done well in our balloting but has generally placed second or third in dining categories to restaurants closer to home. Not this year.
And here I'll pass on a little lesson from this round of results, seeing that we're just a few months away from the next voting period: It really helps to engage your customers and fans in the voting process. Talk to them about Best of the Quad Cities, send them to ballot online, or hand them an issue of the Reader with a ballot. Remember: You can't win if they don't vote.
This might sound like encouraging ballot-stuffing, and in a way it is. But we required people to provide reasonable responses in at least 30 categories. So we had to disqualify roughly half the 500 ballots we received this time, but each of the valid 244 ballots represented a real and fair effort on the part of the voter. Thank you for the time you took.
For now, though, let's celebrate these winners in more than 60 categories. You are truly the Best of the Quad Cities:
