Best of Cincinnati 2018: CityBeat's annual ode to the best people, places, businesses, eats and arts in town, as chosen by readers and staff

Have you ever sat around wishing there were a publication that would list all of the best things in Cincinnati, as determined by a group of your peers as well as a handful of select staffers at your local alt-weekly paper? Well, your wish has been granted. 

CityBeat has been in the business of curating the Best Of Cincinnati_® for more than two decades, highlighting the city’s most outstanding selections in Eats, Arts & Culture, Shops & Services, Music & Nightlife, Sports & Recreation and City Life. And the responsibility of selecting these exceptional entities is divided between our readers and staff.

This year, more than 900,000 votes were tallied to determine our Reader Picks. (Big. Huge. The largest amount of Best Of Cincinnati voters ever, period.) Readers logged on to the ballot site to vote for their favorites in broad categories like Best New Restaurant, Best Bartender and Best Taco, with more niche topics including Best Pumpkin Patch, Best Lawyer and Best Vape Shop. You might not need to know who the Best Used Automotive Dealer is right now, or the Best Realtor, but when you do, we’ve got you covered.

For the Staff Picks — selected by a slightly smaller number of humans — we curated an assemblage of and wrote about our favorite Cincinnati people, places and things (and cocktails, and bands, and banh mi, and art exhibits, and activists, and dogs in tattoo parlors…). Stuff we like and want other people to know about.

Of course, not everything we want to highlight about the city could fit into this issue — that’s part of the reason we have a weekly paper — but at almost 200 pages, we tried to cram as much in here as we could. So if your favorite chili parlor or FC Cincinnati player or hippo isn’t featured, there’s always next year. Voting starts again in early 2019.