TASTE Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the TASTE Awards are and who counts the votes

A restaurant that hears it has been nominated for the TASTE Awards usually has two questions before anything else: who actually runs this vote, and where does my ballot live. Both answers sit with ShoreFoodie.com, which describes itself as the go-to guide for food, dining, and entertainment at the Jersey Shore. The organizer announced the return of the TASTE Awards on its own pages, framing the program as a celebration of the region's thriving food scene and the hardworking individuals behind it. The page carries a byline for Deborah Smith.

ShoreFoodie.com publishes the vote on its own publishing home, jerseybites.com, instead of a third-party contest platform. The ballot page sits at jerseybites.com, the same domain that carries the organizer's food coverage, and the program name in the page title reads ShoreFoodie.com Brings Back TASTE Awards. That phrasing matters for a nominated business: the same address is reused across cycles, so the edition a visitor lands on depends on when they arrive.

The vertical is best-of. The page prints phrases in that style, among them Best Fine Dining Restaurant, Best Casual, Best Italian Restaurant, Best Seafood Restaurant, Best Steakhouse, Best Brunch, Best Chef, Best Wine Program, Best New Restaurant and Best Restaurant Service. These are phrases printed on the ballot page, not a published full roster, so treat them as a sample of the ballot's shape rather than a complete list.

The dated timeline: which TASTE Awards editions are confirmed

The confirmed run is four editions deep. The ballot page at jerseybites.com carries the TASTE Awards across 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, a four-edition stretch that makes the program annual on the strength of its own ballot history rather than on a claim in the copy. The history runs longer still: an earlier page in the organizer's own archive reads "Voting is open for the 2017 Taste Awards celebrating culinary excellence at the Jersey Shore!", so the name was already attached to a Jersey Shore culinary vote in 2017.

For the 2025 cycle the page printed exactly one hard date. Public voting ends May 10th, and the closing is recorded as May 10, 2025. That single line is the whole published window: the opening day is not printed anywhere on the page, and no nomination or entry round dates appear either. A business that hears about its nomination in spring therefore has whatever runway the current page shows and nothing more to plan against.

What the organizer has not published matters as much as what it has. ShoreFoodie.com prints no per-supporter vote limit, no daily return rule, and no eligibility terms anywhere on the TASTE Awards page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The practical reading is straightforward. Four consecutive editions from 2023 through 2026, each anchored to a May close, give a nominated restaurant a recurring spring event to prepare for, while the absence of printed rules means every planning decision about timing and supporter behavior has to be made against the live page rather than against a standing rulebook.

How a supporter votes in the TASTE Awards today

The mechanic is deliberately simple, which is the point of a public vote attached to a dining guide. A supporter opens the TASTE Awards page on jerseybites.com, reads the short introduction to the program, and follows the VOTE HERE link that the page places beside the line telling consumers they can vote for their favorite restaurants. That link is the door to the live ballot; there is no separate registration site and no app to download.

Once on the ballot, the supporter picks a favorite in each category they care to answer. The category phrases printed on the page, from Best Italian Restaurant to Best Chef and Best New Restaurant, indicate a restaurant-and-dining ballot in the familiar best-of style, where each line offers a choice among named local businesses. A diner who only wants to back one restaurant can answer just that line; nothing on the page suggests every category must be completed.

Two practical points follow from the setup. First, because the ballot sits on jerseybites.com itself, the supporter's path is short: one page, one link, one ballot, which makes it easy to hand the address to a regular customer. Second, the deadline is the only fixed point. The 2025 page closed voting on May 10th, so a supporter who means to participate should check the printed close date on the current page before assuming there is time.

Nothing on the page describes an account requirement, a login step or a verification screen, and it equally does not promise their absence. The instructions printed beside the ballot when it loads are the complete and final word on what a supporter must do to make a vote count.

Where the TASTE Awards sit among New Jersey best-of ballots

The Jersey Shore diner who enjoys this ballot has several neighbouring programs to choose from, and the differences between them are worth understanding. Within New Jersey's best-of vertical, the closest relative by publisher is the Jersey Bites Monmouth County Readers' Choice, which comes from the same publishing home at jerseybites.com. The two share a domain but not a ballot: the Readers' Choice is a Monmouth County program, while the TASTE Awards speak for the Jersey Shore's food scene as a whole.

Further afield sit the statewide and regional giants. The Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice runs on a large newspaper platform, the Best of Jersey Shore Contest covers the same coastal market from a different publisher, and the Best of New Jersey and Best of Bergen Community's Choice Awards round out the field, alongside the Bergen & Morris Top Dentists ballot in the health vertical.

Among the group, the TASTE Awards stands apart in focus and host. It is the sole program of the set devoted specifically to restaurants, chefs and dining at the Shore, and it runs on ShoreFoodie.com's own site instead of a contest platform, which keeps the ballot, the branding and the rules in one publisher's hands. For a nominated restaurant, that means the jerseybites.com page is the single source of truth for categories, dates and rules, and no third-party platform sits between the business and the organizer's printed instructions.

Strengthening support for a TASTE Awards nomination

Because the TASTE Awards are a plain public vote on ShoreFoodie.com's own site, support is built the direct way: getting people who already like the business to open the jerseybites.com ballot page and pick it. The organizer publishes no promotional toolkit and no nominee badge program, so the ballot link itself is the asset a nominated restaurant works with. Handing the exact address to diners, posting it where regulars already follow the business, and asking staff to pass it along are the moves this ballot's mechanic actually rewards.

Timing matters more here than on ballots with long published windows, because the only printed date is the close, which fell on May 10th in 2025. A push that starts late in the window has less room to recover from a slow first week. On the rules side, ShoreFoodie.com publishes no statement about outside help, purchased votes or voting software, so nothing on the ballot either permits or forbids them. What purchased support can and cannot do is a separate question from what this ballot's rules say, and anyone weighing it should start from award votes rather than from assumptions about this page.