Best of Miami® 2025 Is Live! Here's How the Sausage Got Made

Like clockwork every March since the beginning of New Times — OK, since the early 1990s — our staff and freelancers have gathered to to assemble the Rube Golberg contraption we call our Best of Miami® issue, which we publish in June.

The genesis of the idea was simple: Fifty-one weeks out of the year, New Times writers and editors spend a good deal of time digging into the simmering stew that is Miami culture and politics, a morass that often involves a fair amount of carping and griping, if not out-and-out corruption and/or mayhem.

But we do it because we love this town, and it seems reasonable to set aside one week of the year to celebrate the stuff we love about living in the Magic City.

Ever assemble a Rube Goldberg machine? It actually involves a fair amount of work — so much so that it really does require four months to gestate, not to mention an editor to wrangle its hundreds of moving parts into some kind of cohesive shape. Enter former New Times music editor Liz Tracy, who for the past two years has stepped up to tame the beast.

And today, we're sharing it with you:


Whether you consume the issue in print or online, you'll find more than 300 South Florida superlatives, from restaurants old and new to bars of the hoity-toity and dive variety. We likewise hail natural wonders galore — parks, beaches, escapes — you name it, the Magic City (and this Best of Miami issue) has got it.

We encourage you to seek out a print copy or save a link to this year's online edition to serve as your guide to our subtropical paradise.

One bit of trivia before we go. Every year, sometime between March 1 and the end of June, at least one of the wonderful places we saluted — how to put this delicately? — passes away. So it was this year with our "Best Barbershop" pick, the venerable Pete's Suniland Barber Shop in Pinecrest, which hung up its smock and scissors after 60 years. Normally, when a place closes before the issue goes live on the site, we quietly yank the blurb. But we're talking 60 years here! So it is that we made the executive decision to leave our Pete's blurb intact as a tip of the proverbial cap.

Best of Miami 2025® was written by Grant Albert, Celia Almeida, Clarissa Buch Zilberman, Carolina del Busto, Alex DeLuca, Jose D. Duran, Asha Elias, Naomi Feinstein, Cindy Ferreiro, Tom Finkel, Theo Karantsalis, Samuel Loetscher, Nicole Lopez-Alvar, Anna Magluta, Douglas Markowitz, Isabel Maza, Sophia Medina, David Rolland, Jesse Scott, Shanae Hardy, Michelle Solomon, Liz Tracy, Caroline Val, Isabel Wilder, and Ryan Yousefi

Design by Kristin Bjornsen. Cover, section openers, and spot illustrations by Rocco Malatesta