48 Hills and the Bay Guardian are proud to present the 50th Annual Best of the Bay! Thousands of our readers voted, telling us who they think deserved to be called “best” in dozens of categories like Best DJ, Best Bar, Best Burrito, Best Dance Party Best Arts Festival, Best Plumber, Best Podcast, Best Pizza, Best Drag Queen….
You can find the results in four sections below, with more of our Editors’ Picks published here (with more to come throughout the year, we can’t stop!). As the Bay Area’s daily, independent, nonprofit, community-funded news + arts site, we need your help to keep this tradition alive and continue serving this great community. Please come to our 11th Annual 48 Hills Gala on October 5, and become a sustaining member here. Also please consider advertising with us—we can’t do this without you!
BEST OF THE BAY 2024 READERS’ POLL WINNERS:
CITY LIVING
Best Salon, Best Bike Repair, Best Podcast, Best Hotel, Best Tour, Best Tailor, Best Gym, more
FOOD & DRINK
Best Burrito, Best Pizza, Best Chinese, Best Brunch, Best Vegan, Best Dive Bar, Best Sports Bar, more
ARTS & NIGHTLIFE
Best Nightclub, Best Art Gallery, Best Drag Queen, Best Karaoke, Best Live Venue, Best DJ, more
SHOPPING
Best Bookstore, Best Bike Shop, Best Store Staff, Best Cannabis Dispensary, Best Shoe Store, more
About Best of the Bay 2024: We are so stocked to have reached this huge 50-year milestone. Here’s the quick backstory: In 1974, GQ magazine approached the Bay Guardian and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann to help it compile a list of all that was great about San Francisco. We loved the idea so much, we decided to let our readers have a voice by voting for their favorites, and the Best of the Bay was born! This was the first citywide, reader-led annual “best of” poll in the nation:
Since this is the 50th year (and my 20th as editor!), we are looking forward to changing things up for the next half-century, so expect some exciting new things coming to this beloved project. For now, we are enshrining the winners as “The New Classics” and giving them, and all the previous winners, runners up, and favorites their much-deserved props for giving us some light and love in these wild times. We’ll be asking readers in the year ahead to tell us what you all would love to see more of, so stay tuned!
As you can see from this year’s Best of the Bay art by Aaron Joseph of Identafire, our guiding spirits were classics of the Bay Area: Carol Doda, Maya Angelou, Sheila E., the Brown Twins, and this lovable Doggy Diner heads. We wanted to pay tribute to trailblazers and summon our collective history and memory to push us through to another 50 years of celebrating what we adore.
For now, though, please enjoy this labor of love that you graciously helped us build, mapping out the very Best of the Best Place on Earth. Thank you! —Marke B.
Artist’s statement from Best of the Bay designer Aaron Joseph of Identafire:
The overlaid drawings are about memory, imagination, individual perception, the way our eyes and brains create a picture that we can understand as a whole out of lots of different information, and I think this contour drawing exercise really exposes something about that particular brain/eye construction of reality. Thematically they are about venerable institutions and heroes that invent, create, steward, and archive SF’s culture and spirit.
We often talk about how San Francisco used to be, but all that used to be STILL IS. It persists. The old STUD building is still here. Carol Doda lives on as memory and ephemera and law and legacy. Queer spaces and drag culture is under attack, but it’s still here and it’s NOT GOING ANYWHERE. Gazing deeply at the things I chose to draw–buildings, towers, monuments, infamous and famous cultural heralds–brought back memories and catalyzed new ideas, gave hints as to why those things were designed the way they were or what that facial expression might really be saying. The city has an undying wisdom and a lineage and a living memory and a consciousness that simply can’t be squashed out. It refuses to die! Tech giants move in and out, capitalism crushes us under its heel, but we’re still here.
To see some additional sketches from this project, click here.
