Philly Favorites: How Voting Works & How to Win

One paper, 71 ways to be the best cheesesteak in town

Eat & Drink isn't one category on the Philly Favorites ballot. It's 71. That single number tells you more about how the Philadelphia Inquirer built this program than any tagline could: instead of one crowded "Best Restaurant" free-for-all, a corner pizza shop in Kensington and a tasting-menu spot in Rittenhouse Square never have to compete for the same slot.

The whole ballot runs 12 categories deep, and Eat & Drink is just the biggest of them. Getting into the right one of those 71 subcategories, not just the right broad heading, is the actual first decision a business has to make, well before anyone thinks about reminders or QR codes.

That 750-plus winner count isn't padding. It's a direct consequence of running the ballot this granular. See the Pennsylvania contest hub for how Philly Favorites sits alongside the state's other readers-choice programs.

The nominate stage decides who even gets a ballot slot

Nothing shows up on votephillyfaves.com by default. A business has to clear the nomination round first, and only after that does the finalist voting page populate with real names in real subcategories.

Skipping the nomination step is the single most common mistake here

A shop owner who waits for "voting to open" before mentioning Philly Favorites to a single customer has already missed the window that actually determines the ballot. Nominations aren't a formality tacked onto the front of the process. They're the gate.

Businesses running a parallel award-style push, the kind covered in award vote campaigns, or specifically in the restaurant space, where restaurant vote campaign planning covers timing customer reminders across a similar two-stage ballot, should treat the nomination window as the real deadline, not the vote close.

Daily, not hourly, not once. That distinction runs the whole calendar

Once per day, per category. Not once total, not an hourly reset. A supporter who votes Monday morning can vote again Tuesday, and the same category resets fresh every 24 hours until the ballot shuts near February 27.

A daily cap this steady also means one missed reminder costs exactly one day's worth of votes, no more. That's a forgiving structure compared to a ballot with a single lifetime click, and it's why spacing reminders across the whole window beats concentrating them at the finish.

An Inquirer reader isn't a Philadelphia Magazine reader

The Philadelphia Inquirer runs Philly Favorites. Philadelphia Magazine runs a separate program, Best of Philly, with its own ballot and its own rules. Two different publishers, two different reader bases, and two results pages that never merge.

That matters for tone. Inquirer readers are people already checking a daily news site, so a factual reminder, category name, subcategory, direct link, tends to land better than a hype-forward push built for a lifestyle-magazine audience. Keep the message short: what it is, where to vote, and how often.

A founder-facing business where the owner's own name carries weight with regulars might also look at personal-brand vote outreach for framing a reminder that pairs a recognizable face with the official votephillyfaves.com link.

Subcategory precision matters more here than on almost any comparable ballot

Pittsburgh's Best of the 'Burgh runs roughly 8 broad category groups. Philly Favorites runs 12, and stuffs 71 of them into Eat & Drink alone. That density changes the entire campaign, since a vote cast against the wrong one of those 71 slots simply doesn't count toward the right listing.

A South Philadelphia hoagie shop and a Manayunk brunch spot might both think of themselves loosely as "restaurants," but if the live ballot splits sandwiches, brunch, and casual dining into separate lines, guessing wrong here costs the entire nomination, not just a slower vote count. Confirm the exact subcategory wording on votephillyfaves.com before printing a single table card.

For the mechanics readers-choice programs share more broadly, see getting votes for an online contest, and for how a comparable Pennsylvania program handles its own vote-cap quirk, Best of the 'Burgh runs an hourly cap instead of a daily one, worth knowing for any business weighing both metros.

There's no leaderboard to check, so the calendar is the only signal that matters

Philly Favorites never shows a running tally. The Inquirer doesn't publish live standings for any of its 12 categories, 71-strong Eat & Drink included, so a business watching for a real-time count on votephillyfaves.com will find nothing to watch. Any outside site claiming otherwise is guessing, or scraping something the paper never released.

With no scoreboard to chase, the only dates worth tracking are the ones the Inquirer actually sets: the nomination window that builds the ballot, the daily-per-category voting stretch that follows, and the close near February 27. That's also why generic phrasing like "vote for us" holds up fine mid-campaign, while a specific win claim only holds up once the Inquirer's own results post; see how legitimate vote campaigns are structured, and how online contest votes work for the general mechanics a daily-cap ballot like this one builds on.