A-List St. Louis Magazine: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two rounds, one ballot page. How the A-List actually moves

Same URL, two different forms. Early in the cycle, stlmag.com/alist shows an open write-in field, category by category, where readers type in the business they want to nominate. Later, that page becomes something else entirely, a fixed finalist ballot built only from whichever names cleared the write-in round.

St. Louis Magazine doesn't collapse both stages into a single click-and-vote form the way some smaller regional polls do. A business that skips the write-in phase has nothing to campaign for once the finalist ballot goes live, no matter how loyal its customer base.

360,000 votes across 150 categories works out to an average of a couple thousand votes per category, though the real spread is nowhere near even. A crowded category like restaurants pulls far more traffic than a niche home-services slot. See the Missouri contest hub for how the A-List sits alongside the state's other fan-vote and readers' choice programs.

Roughly 150 categories means picking the right one is half the campaign

That's not a typo. St. Louis Magazine runs the A-List across close to 150 separate categories, food and drink, retail, health and beauty, home and garden, professional services, and more. Each is its own contest with its own finalist field.

Match the label to how customers already describe the business

A wine bar that also serves small plates could plausibly sit under two or three different food categories. Guessing wrong costs a business the entire write-in round, not just a slower start, because votes for a mismatched category name simply don't count toward the business's actual field.

For the general mechanics behind any award-style vote push, see award-style vote campaigns. A restaurant weighing where its A-List effort fits alongside other local recognition can also check restaurant vote campaign planning, which covers timing customer reminders across a similar nominate-then-vote structure.

Plan around the September issue, not the write-in deadline

Results land in St. Louis Magazine's September issue. Everything before that, write-in nomination, finalist selection, public voting, is setup for that one publication date. A business that treats the write-in round as an afterthought usually finds out too late that its category filled up without it.

A business that has only ever run a single-stage local poll tends to underrate the write-in phase. It isn't a formality here; it's the round that decides who even gets a ballot slot.

St. Louis is a metro of neighborhoods first, categories second

Clayton, the Hill, Webster Groves, Kirkwood, University City, South City, Chesterfield, St. Charles. Ask a St. Louis reader where they're from and they'll usually name one of those before they say "St. Louis." The A-List groups its ballot by category, not neighborhood, so a Clayton wine bar and a Hill Italian restaurant can land in entirely separate food categories while a Webster Groves salon and a Chesterfield salon might compete head to head.

That neighborhood identity still shapes how a campaign should sound. A South City business messaging its regulars reads differently than a Chesterfield business messaging a suburban customer base, even when both are chasing the same A-List category label. St. Louis Magazine's own readership skews toward readers who already know these neighborhood distinctions, so generic "vote for us, St. Louis!" messaging tends to land flatter than something that names the actual block or street.

Businesses weighing whether the A-List is worth the write-in effort alongside other regional recognition can compare notes with Best of New Jersey, which runs a similar write-in-then-vote structure for a different statewide readership.

There's no archive of past A-List winners to lean on, so name the year every time

St. Louis Magazine doesn't keep a browsable, category-by-category record of past A-List cycles anywhere on stlmag.com. Search for last year's home-services winner or the 2023 restaurant field and there's nothing to click through to. The September issue and that cycle's results page are the record, and once a new cycle starts, the old one isn't sitting online for reference the way some publications archive theirs.

That gap matters most when a St. Louis business is sizing up a competitor's claim or wording its own. A rival's Instagram bio reading "A-List Best Nail Salon" with nothing else attached can't be checked against an archive, so ask directly for the year and the category, since those two details are what separate a real placement from a leftover claim nobody bothered to update. Wording an actual placement works the same way in reverse: "A-List 2025 winner, Best Nail Salon" holds up because St. Louis Magazine can confirm that exact pairing, while a bare "St. Louis's best" invites the question of which of the roughly 150 categories, and which September, is actually being referenced. Until the magazine or stlmag.com/alist/readers-choice-winners-2025/ names a category for a business by name, "finalist" and "nominated" are the accurate words to use, not "winner." A business new to this kind of readers' poll can check how a legitimate vote push is supposed to look, and how online contest votes work for the general mechanics this two-stage ballot builds on.