INDY's Best of the Triangle: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and who runs INDY's Best of the Triangle

INDY's Best of the Triangle is the readers' choice award program of INDY Week, the alternative weekly newspaper serving the Triangle region of North Carolina. The paper's masthead places it in the Assembly Local Network, and its mailing address, P.O. Box 1772, Durham, NC 27702, sits in the heart of the market the ballot covers. Readers in Durham, Orange/Chatham and Wake counties nominate and vote for local businesses, and the paper publishes the results as an annual winners roundup.

The ballot is a community award in the truest sense: the winners are decided entirely by public vote, and the roundup opens with the line that readers have spoken. The 2025 winners list shows the flavour of the program. Food and drink dominate, with categories for bagels, barbecue, biscuits, bakery, brunch, burgers, catering, cocktails, beer retail and breweries. The winning names are the kind of institutions locals argue about: Isaac for bagels, Q Shack for barbecue, Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen for biscuits, Guglhupf Bakery for both bakery and brunch, Mediterranean Deli for catering, The Velvet Hippo for cocktails, Beer Study for beer retail and Ponysaurus for brewery.

Unlike many readers' choice contests, this one keeps the whole experience on indyweek.com, with no rented balloting platform in the middle.

The dated history of the Best of the Triangle

The franchise is old by readers' choice standards. In 1996 the Independent Weekly, the paper's earlier identity, started its Best of the Triangle issue under the name "The Real Best of", a label chosen so it would not collide with the Best of edition published by the Spectator, then the competition. The program has outlived that rivalry and continues under the INDY Week banner today.

Confirmed editions run in 2024, 2025 and 2026. The 2025 cycle is the best documented, and it split the year in a way worth noting for any business planning a campaign. Entries were accepted from Friday, January 24 through Tuesday, February 11, which is when businesses could nominate themselves into their relevant categories. The Triangle-wide ballot then opened September 30 through November 11, an autumn window of roughly six weeks. The results now live on the winners roundup page, titled INDY's 2025 Best of the Triangle Winners, which remains the reference URL for the program.

What the paper has not printed anywhere on these pages is a per-supporter voting limit, a one-per-day rule or an eligibility standard for voters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The next cycle's exact nomination and voting dates follow the same pattern, published on the paper's own schedule.

How a supporter votes in the 2025-style ballot

Casting a vote here means taking part in a plain public poll carried out on indyweek.com. A supporter who wants to back a favourite business starts at the Best of the Triangle section of the site, where the current cycle's ballot sits alongside the nomination form and the previous winners roundup. There is no third-party platform in the loop, so nothing leaves indyweek.com between opening the ballot and casting a vote.

The cycle has a shape worth understanding before you vote. Businesses go first: INDY Week tells them they can nominate their business for its relevant categories, and in the 2025 cycle that window ran from January 24 through February 11. Only after nominations close does the reader-facing ballot open, which in 2025 meant September 30 through November 11. A supporter then picks favourites across the published categories, which in the most recent edition ranged from bagels and biscuits to breweries and cocktail bars.

Two practical points follow. Taking part costs nothing, and no purchase is part of participating. And because the ballot sits on the paper's own domain, the category list you see on the live ballot is the authoritative roster for that cycle, not a summary published elsewhere.

How this ballot sits beside its North Carolina neighbours

The Triangle ballot is part of a wider North Carolina family of readers' choice programs, each run by its own publisher for its own market. Statewide, Best of North Carolina covers the whole state. In the Charlotte market, the Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards serve the state's largest city. East of the Triangle, the Daily Reflector Best Of Pitt County does the same work for Greenville's county, while the Fayetteville Community's Choice Awards cover the Fayetteville market.

Two smaller programs round out the set: Best of Chowan County in the state's northeast and Best of Haywood in the western mountains.

INDY's program stands apart from that set on scale and heritage. It covers a three-county metro anchored by Durham and Raleigh, it has run since 1996, and it is carried on the publisher's own domain rather than a shared contest platform. A business weighing where to put a get-out-the-vote effort therefore faces a genuine regional readership with a long habit of voting, and the ballot's rules, when published, sit on the same site as the vote itself.

Strengthening support during the Triangle ballot

Because this cycle has a nomination phase before voting, the smartest push starts in winter. A business that misses the January 24 through February 11 entry window cannot appear on the fall ballot at all, so the earliest ask to customers is a nomination ask, not a vote ask. Once the September 30 through November 11 window opens, the same customers need a second, separate reminder to vote, since nominating and voting are distinct actions on this ballot.

Nothing INDY Week publishes addresses outside voting help for this program, so the honest position is that the rules are unstated rather than permissive. Any push that depends on volume rather than genuine customers carries risk the paper's pages do not address. Our award votes page explains the general landscape without promising outcomes, and no outside help of any kind can promise a first-place finish in a readers' vote decided by the public.