Sauce Readers' Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why Sauce Readers' Choice matters in St. Louis

Sauce Readers' Choice is the annual ballot where Sauce Magazine hands the microphone to its own audience. The magazine states the premise plainly: every year, it invites readers to vote on their favorite local places to eat, drink and shop. That framing matters, because the ballot is not a critic's list or an industry jury. The people filling it in are the same people buying banh mi, ordering cocktails and browsing boutiques across the St. Louis metro, which makes a high placement a direct read on customer loyalty rather than on press favor.

The program runs on saucemagazine.com itself. No outside balloting service sits between the reader and the form, which keeps the whole cycle inside a publication whose regular audience already follows its restaurant news, openings and drink coverage. A business that wants visibility in front of that audience is really competing for the attention of engaged St. Louis eaters, and the winners page is the proof that the audience showed up.

For a local operator, the practical value is the company the ballot keeps. The 2022 roundup ranked Vietnamese restaurants in the region, placed Pho Grand, DD Mau and Mai Lee, and noted that Pho Grand announced plans to close June 13 after the poll closed. A placement beside names like those is a marketing asset in its own right.

The dated facts: which editions ran and when the window falls

Three editions of Sauce Readers' Choice are confirmed: 2022, 2025 and 2026. The 2022 cycle is the best documented, because its winners page is still live at the places-2 address on saucemagazine.com, titled 2022 Sauce Readers' Choice Winners. That page carries the magazine's standing description of the program, the every-year invitation to readers, and the ranked results for the cycle.

On timing, the 2022 material anchors the ballot to June. The results text notes that Pho Grand announced plans to close June 13 following the poll's close, which places the end of that cycle in the first half of the month. The page leaves the 2022 opening day unstated, and it prints no calendar for 2025 or 2026 either. Sauce Magazine has not published the exact open and close dates, the full category roster, or any per-reader limit on the archived page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the confirmed years do support is recurrence. The magazine's own sentence, that it invites readers every year, combined with editions in 2022, 2025 and 2026, marks this as a returning fixture on the St. Louis food scene rather than a single promotion. The gap between the 2022 and 2025 confirmations is simply a gap in what is preserved, not evidence that the ballot skipped years, and the 2025 and 2026 back-to-back editions show the program active in recent cycles.

How a reader votes in Sauce Readers' Choice today

Voting in Sauce Readers' Choice is a straightforward public ballot published on saucemagazine.com. A reader who wants to take part goes to the magazine's site, finds the current Readers' Choice ballot, and names favorite local places in the categories the form presents. The ballot covers places to eat, places to drink and places to shop, so a single reader's ballot can span restaurants, bars and retailers across the St. Louis metro.

Because the form sits on saucemagazine.com, the reader never creates an account on an outside service to take part. The reader interacts directly with Sauce Magazine's form, and the results come back to the same site as a ranked winners roundup, as the 2022 page demonstrates with its first, second and third placements and honorable mentions.

Two practical points follow from what the page shows. First, the archived page does not state whether a reader may return daily, whether an email address is required, or whether any eligibility rule applies, so the live form settles those details for the cycle in progress. Second, the window is not permanently dated anywhere on the preserved page, so a reader who wants to vote should check the site during the cycle rather than relying on a remembered date. The ballot's own printed dates, once live, are the ones that count.

How this ballot sits beside other Missouri readers' choice programs

Sauce Readers' Choice belongs to a wider family of Missouri best-of ballots, and its nearest neighbours split by geography and by publisher. Within St. Louis itself, the A-List St. Louis Magazine ballot is the closest analogue, because both are publication-run readers' polls covering the same metro's food and lifestyle scene. Feast Magazine FEAST 50 also serves the St. Louis market from a food-focused publication, giving the metro three distinct publisher audiences a restaurant can appeal to.

Outside the metro, the state's ballot map spreads wide. Best of KC serves the state's western metro under its own publisher, Best of Southwest Missouri covers the state's southwest, and the college town of Columbia supports two programs of its own, the Columbia Missourian Reader's Choice Awards and Columbia MO CommunityVotes. None of those answers to Sauce Magazine, and support earned in one Missouri program does not transfer to the others.

What distinguishes the Sauce ballot within this set is its narrow, food-and-drink-first identity and its home on the magazine's own site. A St. Louis restaurant deciding where to invest outreach effort is really choosing which audience to mobilize, and Sauce's readers arrive already primed to think about where to eat and drink.

Strengthening support for your place on the Sauce ballot

Support on this ballot comes from people who already visit you, so the work is mobilization, not persuasion. Put the ballot link where your regulars already look: your counter, your receipts, your email list and your own social channels. A short, specific ask, naming the category you are hoping to win, converts far better than a generic plea, because the St. Louis reader filling in the form is choosing among places they already know.

Timing matters against the June-anchored rhythm the 2022 dates show. A push that starts after the printed close date is worth nothing, so confirm the window on the live ballot and plan your reminders around it. The magazine's archived page prints no rules text about outside help, purchased support or vote collection, so the live form's own terms are what govern; whatever they say, an outreach pattern stuffed with irregular activity can endanger the very entry it was meant to help.

To see what tends to work in readers' polls of this kind, the guide at getting more votes online walks through outreach that stays inside an organizer's rules, and the award-votes page explains how purchased support is generally handled in best-of ballots like this one.