Best of Louisville: How Voting Works & How to Win

Thirty-five years in, and the ballot still runs in two stages

2025 marked the 35th annual Best of Louisville. That's not a small number for a metro readers-choice program. It means the ballot predates most of the businesses currently campaigning for a spot on it, and readers who've lived in Louisville for a decade or more have likely voted in it more than once without thinking twice about the format.

The format itself has two stages, and skipping the first one ends a business's chances before voting even opens. Louisville Magazine takes open nominations first, at loumag.secondstreetapp.com, then narrows the field to a finalist ballot that goes to public voting. No public vote count exists during the nomination window itself — only the entry field.

A program that's run 35 straight years has also survived at least one platform migration and, almost certainly, several rounds of category renaming, details that don't show up anywhere except that year's live ballot. Treat the current loumag.secondstreetapp.com page as the only authority on this year's exact rules, not a memory of how the poll worked five years back. See the Kentucky contest hub for how this compares with the state's other readers-choice programs.

One statewide sibling, two very different ballots

Kentucky Living's Best in Kentucky covers the entire commonwealth on a fixed May 1-31 voting window at KentuckyLiving.com, a magazine with over a million monthly readers, running maybe 30 categories statewide. Best of Louisville is narrower and metro-specific, with no fixed May window; it runs on Louisville Magazine's own calendar and its own SecondStreet-hosted ballot.

A Louisville business can run both without conflict

Nothing about entering Best of Louisville disqualifies a business from also nominating itself for Best in Kentucky in the same year. They're separate publishers, separate platforms, separate results pages. A downtown bakery could plausibly show up in both magazines' "Best of" issues in the same twelve months — a Best of Louisville win doesn't feed into or count toward the statewide ballot at all.

For a business deciding where to put limited campaign time, that scope difference matters more than the category overlap. A Louisville bakery chasing a statewide readers-choice mention needs an entirely different outreach radius than one just trying to win its own zip code's poll. See award-style vote campaigns for the general mechanics behind running either kind of push.

What the nomination-to-vote gap actually costs a business that skips it

Miss the nomination window, and there's nothing to campaign for once voting opens. The finalist ballot only contains names that cleared that first round. A business that waits for "the real vote" to start pushing has already lost the cycle.

A restaurant used to single-stage local polls (the kind where one link goes out and the count starts immediately) tends to underrate the nomination stage here. It isn't a formality; it's the entire gate. The restaurant vote campaign guide covers timing reminders across a two-stage structure like this one.

Downtown, St. Matthews, and Jeffersontown aren't competing categories

Best of Louisville groups its ballot by category, not by neighborhood. A downtown Louisville restaurant and one in St. Matthews can land in the same "Best Restaurant" race; a Jeffersontown auto-repair shop never runs against a downtown law firm, because the category itself is the dividing line, not which part of the metro either business calls home.

That matters because Louisville's neighborhoods carry distinct identities readers respond to. A business leaning on its St. Matthews roots or its NuLu storefront in a reminder message tends to land better locally than a generic "vote for us" push with no neighborhood texture at all — readers here notice the difference between a business that knows its own block and one running a copy-paste campaign.

Businesses drawing customers from both sides of the Ohio River should also weigh a category's actual geographic center of gravity before nominating; a business physically in New Albany competing in a "Louisville" category is a judgment call the ballot's rules, not this guide, ultimately settle.

What Louisville Magazine doesn't publish, and why that limits any claim

No single public archive covers all 35 years of Best of Louisville winners in one place. That's a real gap, not a shortcut this guide can paper over. Old print issues and secondhand recap pages circulate claims that may not hold up once checked against the actual Louisville Magazine issue for that year.

Sourcing a competitor's claim before repeating it takes three things: which year, which category, and the exact wording Louisville Magazine actually printed. Nothing looser holds up. A business promoting its own result can lean on "Best of Louisville 2025, [category], Louisville Magazine" with confidence, because a reader can go check the issue. Strip the year and the category out of that sentence and it stops being verifiable — it just becomes a business's own opinion of itself. Businesses building a full nomination push from scratch can start with the mechanics behind any online vote drive, and for a personality-driven nomination specifically, the personal-brand vote outreach guide covers naming a spokesperson alongside the official ballot link.