From the Editor: How We Make the A-List
Photograph by Matthew O'Shea
This is the seventh year of St. Louis Magazine’s A-List—in which our editors pick the city’s greatest car wash, the best new bar, the most fun old haunt. Though the feature only comes to you every July (“A-List 2010,” p. 59), its production is for us a year-round endeavor. Should one of our editors catch a September-evening cocktail on a gem of a rooftop terrace, you might hear his enthusiasm for it the following July in an A-List entry. If another staffer finds, through her own weekend hunt, a memorably helpful hardware-store guy, that reporter’s notebook gets a note, and there you are meeting him in our pages come summer. (“Let’s remember that for A-List” is an oft-heard line at SLM HQ.)
Of course, this is just one way we recognize A-List excellence. Another equally used way is determining which categories would mean the most to our readers—“People are often looking for great private dining rooms to book,” says one staffer. “And inexpensive handbags.”… “And a new place to hear blues,” others chime in—and then spending a handful of months browsing, buying, listening, tasting, testing, comparing, debating. We ultimately pick what we believe’s the best.
This year there’s a third way the magazine celebrates the city’s greatest stuff. Earlier this spring, we announced online and in these pages that we’d be posting a Readers’ Picks voting form at stlmag.com. More than 1,500 of you showed up during the six weeks of voting, opinions in mind, and submitted picks across more than 50 categories. Many voted the whole ballot, while others chose selectively. All in all, readers submitted more than 15,000 individual picks—a number we’re quite pleased with for this debut effort. As you read this issue’s cover feature, you’ll see that alongside the editors’ picks, we’ve named the top vote-getters in each Readers’ Pick category.
As a final new addition to this evolving project, we’re inviting you to return to stlmag.com for a bit more. During the month of July, we’ll post online not just the No. 1 Readers’ Picks in each category, but the top five. That makes another 200-plus St. Louis businesses and organizations that have been deemed worthy of public celebration. Thanks for being part of the party.
Stephen Schenkenberg
