Riverfront Times Best of St. Louis: How Voting Works & How to Win

A 2024 sale ended the print edition. The vote didn't stop.

Riverfront Times changed owners in 2024, and the paper stopped printing altogether, shifting to an online-only publication. That's the kind of transition that has quietly killed off more than one alt-weekly's signature readers' poll elsewhere in the country. Best of St. Louis wasn't one of them. Voting kept running at vote.riverfronttimes.com straight through the sale.

A St. Louis business should not skim past that survival. A readers' poll tied to a newsstand issue that no longer exists would have nowhere obvious to point supporters. Riverfront Times solved that by keeping the ballot itself, not the print run, as the actual product.

A fixed vote cap, an exact opening date, and a public results archive spanning multiple years all stayed missing from everything gathered for this page. Treat vote.riverfronttimes.com as the only authority on any given cycle's live rules, and see the Missouri contest hub for the rest of what's running statewide, business ballots and prep sports polls alike.

Four category groups, and a subdomain built to hold the ballot alone

Arts and entertainment. Restaurants. Services. Sports. Those four groups are what's confirmed about Best of St. Louis's structure, and each functions as its own lane inside vote.riverfronttimes.com rather than one flat list of nominees.

Why the dedicated voting subdomain matters

Plenty of alt-weeklies fold their readers' poll into a regular section of the main site, buried under a menu a first-time voter has to find. Riverfront Times instead runs Best of St. Louis on its own subdomain. A shared link that points straight at vote.riverfronttimes.com skips that hunt entirely, which matters more now that there's no print issue sitting on a coffee table as a reminder.

For the general mechanics behind any award-style vote push, award-style vote campaigns covers ground that applies here, and a restaurant weighing its entry specifically may find the restaurant vote campaign guide useful for pacing reminders around a category this broad.

St. Louis's alt-weekly readership doesn't live in Clayton or Chesterfield

Cherokee Street. The Grove. Delmar Loop. Soulard. Tower Grove. South Grand. Dutchtown. Benton Park. Ask a longtime Riverfront Times reader where the city's actual character lives and those are the names that come up before anything in West County. This is the paper that has historically chased the DIY venue, the immigrant-owned restaurant strip, the dive bar with the good jukebox, over the glossy suburban side of the metro.

That readership shapes how a Best of St. Louis campaign should sound. A Cherokee Street taco stand messaging its regulars reads nothing like a suburban chain's "vote for us" post, and Riverfront Times' own audience tends to notice the difference. Businesses weighing whether that alt-weekly framing fits their brand can compare it against St. Louis Magazine's glossier, suburban-leaning A-List readership on the A-List St. Louis Magazine guide, which runs a write-in-then-finalist structure aimed at a different kind of reader entirely.

None of that changes how the ballot itself is organized. Best of St. Louis groups by category, not neighborhood, so a Delmar Loop bar and a South County bar can land in the same Services or Restaurants slot regardless of which side of the city each calls home.

Sports is one category here, not the whole program

Missouri runs several standalone sports recognitions elsewhere in the state, the KCTV5 Hy-Vee Team of the Week and the KSHB 41 Hy-Vee Athlete of the Week among them, both weekly TV-driven programs in the Kansas City market. Best of St. Louis is a different animal. Sports sits inside it as one of four category groups, alongside arts, restaurants, and services, in a single citywide readers' poll rather than a dedicated athletic showcase.

A youth sports league or a local gym entered in the sports category competes against other sports-adjacent nominees, not against the restaurant or arts fields on the same ballot. That's a narrower comparison than it might sound, given how wide the other three groups run. Kansas City runs its own separate best-of program too, covered on the Best of KC guide, for businesses on that side of the state weighing a similar readers' poll.

There's no multi-year archive here, so name the year and category every time

Riverfront Times doesn't keep an easily browsable, category-by-category record of past Best of St. Louis cycles the way some outlets archive theirs. That gap widened after the 2024 sale, when the print issue that once served as a physical record stopped existing altogether.

Precise claims hold up better than broad ones here. "Best of St. Louis 2026, Best Wine Bar" cites a specific year and category a reader can check against vote.riverfronttimes.com. "Best of St. Louis winner" with nothing else attached does not, and it risks stating something Riverfront Times hasn't confirmed in that form. Before results post, "nominated" is the accurate word for what this ballot confirms, not "winner."

A vote-promotion service can help a business reach the customers it already has, pointed at the correct category on vote.riverfronttimes.com, on the correct schedule. It cannot guarantee where a category lands once every other real nominee's supporters show up too. How online contest votes work lays out those mechanics in full, and is buying votes legal settles the legal question before any budget goes toward a Best of St. Louis campaign.