The Pitch's Best of KC

Best of KC is the annual readers’ poll run by The Pitch, Kansas City’s alternative weekly — a metro-wide vote across roughly 500 categories that produces some 400-450 winners a year and fills the paper’s largest issue. It is not a jury, a critics’ list or an audit: it is a popularity vote, conducted in rounds, and that is both its limitation and the entire point of it. Read carefully it is one of the better available records of what Kansas Citians actually patronise, category by category, year over year.

Why this Wiki keeps it

A civic record of locally owned Kansas City has an obvious problem: which businesses matter, and to whom? Health-department filings, business licences and press coverage all answer that question from the outside. Best of KC answers it from the inside — hundreds of thousands of votes cast by residents about the places they actually go.¹ It is the closest thing the metro has to a continuous, structured, self-reported account of its own tastes.

Its weaknesses run the same direction as its strengths, and are worth stating plainly:

• It measures popularity, not quality, longevity or significance. A place with an energetic social-media following outpolls a quieter place that has been good for forty years.
• Vote counts are published but never audited. The numbers on these pages are what the poll reported. They are not turnout figures and cannot be compared across categories with confidence.
• The ballot itself moves. Categories appear and vanish year to year — 60 of them between 2024 and 2025 alone — so a business “falling off” often means its category was cut, not that anything changed on the ground.
• It is a commercial product as well as an editorial one. Nominees can buy listings, ads and placement upgrades in the results directory, and can buy plaques afterward.¹ That does not decide who wins, but it does shape who campaigns.

The KS.City Wiki therefore treats a Best of KC placing as evidence of standing, never as a qualification for a page — a distinction set out in the living-persons policy and applied hardest to the poll’s performer categories.

How the vote works

The modern poll runs in two rounds. In 2014 — the earliest year for which The Pitch has published its own mechanics in a form still online — the first round opened in July as an open nomination, closing August 15; the field was then narrowed to the top three and reopened for a second round from August 20 to September 17, with results revealed in the Best of KC issue on October 9.² That year the ballot was split thematically into “the best of the day” — people and places, goods and services, sports and rec — and “the best of the night” — food, drink, arts and entertainment.² The day/night framing was dropped, but those six groupings are recognisably the group structure the poll still uses.

Results are published in three ranks: Winner, Runner-Up and Finalist, with everything from third place down carried as “Finalist.”³ The publication month has since moved from October to early summer; the 2026 issue appeared in June.⁴

Since 2021 the results have been published through a third-party awards platform, SceneThink, as a browsable winners portal alongside the print issue.³

Scale, 2021-2025

Five years are held here in full, one page each. Every winner is listed; runners-up and finalists remain on The Pitch’s own portals.

Year	Placings	Categories	Distinct winners	Page
2021	2,545	518	413	Best of KC 2021
2022	2,911	510	415	Best of KC 2022
2023	3,053	504	418	Best of KC 2023
2024	2,906	488	396	Best of KC 2024
2025	2,419	446	377	Best of KC 2025

Across the five years the poll published 13,834 placings naming 6,009 distinct entities — businesses, venues, festivals, bands, performers, and in a few hundred cases individual dishes, albums and plays.³

The ballot is contracting. It peaked in 2023 at 3,053 placings across 504 categories and has fallen every year since, to 2,419 across 446 in 2025 — a fifth of the ballot gone in two years. The categories cut in that window were disproportionately arts-and-nightlife ones: Best Fashion Event, Best Music Festival, Best Live Theater, Best Local Brewery, Best Speakeasy and Best Youth Theater all ran for the last time in 2024.

The groups

The ballot is organised into eleven standing groups, with occasional additions:

Food · Drink · Barbecue · Goods & Services · Shopping · Arts & Entertainment · People & Places · Health & Fitness · Weddings · Sports & Rec · CBD/Hemp/THC

Two are worth noting. Barbecue is a group of its own, with thirteen to fifteen categories — Best Burnt Ends, Best Rub, Best Old School Barbecue — which is a fair reflection of the city and unusual among American alt-weekly polls. CBD/Hemp/THC first appears in 2022 and grows each year after, tracking Missouri’s cannabis legalisation. A Lawrence (LFK) group ran in 2021 only.

Sources

Footnotes

1. “Your Best of KC 2026 picks are here!” — The Pitch, Best of KC 2026 hub page (accessed 2026-09-12) · Asserts: the 2026 issue “now in stands and online”; voting “by the hundreds of thousands”; the winners/runners-up/finalists framing; the paid plaque offer and the SEO-boosting ad placements in the results directory. ↩ ↩²

2. Justin Kendall, “The Pitch’s Best of Kansas City voting is now open” — The Pitch, July 23, 2014 (accessed 2026-09-12) · Asserts: the two-round structure; first-round voting closing August 15; the field narrowed to the top three; second round August 20 - September 17; results published in the Best of KC issue October 9; and the day/night division of that year’s ballot into people & places, goods & services, sports & rec against food, drink, arts & entertainment. ↩ ↩²

3. All figures on this page derive from the five results portals themselves, harvested 2026-09-12 and held at 05_Operations/Pitch-Best-Of-KC-Awards-2021-2025.csv. Portal URLs are cited on each year page; method, per-year portal slugs and coverage limits are recorded with the dataset. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Cory Swieczkowski, “Best of KC 2026: Board, but never bored. It’s a gaming town.” — The Pitch (accessed 2026-09-12) · Asserts: that the annual Best of Kansas City issue was published earlier that month, that it contains the readers’-poll results, and that a separate editorial staff-picks list runs alongside the poll and is published online through June and July. ↩