CityBeat has been in the business of curating the Best Of Cincinnati® for more than 25 years, highlighting the city’s most outstanding selections in Arts & Culture, Eats, Shops & Services, Music & Nightlife, City Life and Sports & Recreation.

And the responsibility of selecting these exceptional entities is divided between our readers and publication staff. Readers logged on to the ballot site to vote for their favorites in broad categories like Best New Restaurant, Best Free Attraction and Best Boutique, with more niche topics including Best Hot Dog, Best Place to Play Pool and Best Haunted House. You might not need to know who makes the Best Wedding Cakes right now, or who the Best Lawyer is, 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 city steps to walk and comic book shops with cocktails and cat cafes), stuff we like, appreciate and want other people to know about.

Of course, not everything we want to highlight about the city could fit into this issue, but we tried to cram as much in here as we could. So if your favorite brewery or Bengal or chili parlor isn’t featured, there’s always next year.