Feed the best

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Have y’all voted for the Best of Northern Nevada yet? Go to vote.newsreview.com/best-of-reno-2016 and express your opinions on the best local restaurants, bars, parks and barbers. I know I’ve been harping on the contest just about every week lately, but it’s a big undertaking, and we’re proud to host it every year. And we like it when our readers vote.

The contest ends on July 14, but we’re a couple of weeks into the voting, so I thought I’d take a minute to address a few questions I’ve heard: There are always a few winners from previous years who are disappointed that the categories they won a year or two ago no longer exist. Every year, we drop the categories with the fewest number of overall votes the previous year. “Best club DJ” and “best drag queen” were among the categories we were sad to see cut this year because of lack of votes last year. But, you know, feel free to suggest them in the suggest-a-category section under “freestyle” on the voting page. If the showing is strong, we’ll add them back next year.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that we reserve the right to not name winners in any given category, even if it’s on the ballot. Usually, if we decide not to name winners, it’s because there’s a first-place tie spread across four or more entries. This sometimes happens in categories that are more wide than deep—best elementary school teacher, for example—where we’ve sometimes seen, like, a six-way tie at six votes apiece.

There are also business owners who have written or called wondering about fees to have their businesses added to the ballot—I can’t stress this enough: the ballot is all write-in. We have an autocomplete list, which helps readers spell tricky words like “Beaujolais” and “Schieve,” and it also makes our job a hell of a lot easier when it comes time to check the vote tallies, but even if the local business, place or personality you want to vote for doesn’t pop up in the autocomplete, you can still write it in. And even if you don’t spell it correctly, we’ll make sure your vote is counted.