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Best Alternative Medicine

East-West Health Alliance

All those new-age clichés about nurturing and caring and sensing energies and auras? They apply here, but it's the real thing. East-West is not a huge, bustling operation; the office is intimate and tranquil. You will not find every specialty under the sun here, but you will find gifted and skilled healers who incorporate conventional and alternative medicine within both Eastern and Western traditions. Acupuncture physician and herbalist Lori Alexandra Bell received her early training in China and has wide experience diagnosing nonphysical causes of illness and treating immune-system diseases. Santiago Sifre, acupuncture physician and herbalist, specializes in pain management, sports injuries, and neurological disorders. Cora Lira is billed as a "holistic chiropractor," and her approach indeed goes deeper than spinal adjustments, even to the body's cellular memories. Lesley Anne Gilbert is a massage therapist who concentrates on deep-tissue massage for neuromuscular "re-education."

Best Cuban-League Baseball Player Living In Miami

Camilo Pascual

Pascual threw one of the sweetest curve balls in baseball history while playing for the Minnesota Twins from 1961 to 1966. The Reds, L.A. Dodgers, and Cleveland also made good use of his right arm, though only briefly. But before his stint in the American big leagues, Pascual played the game in Cuba, his native country, from 1953 to 1961. When he wasn't throwing for Los Elefantes de Cienfuegos or Los Tigres de Marianao, he pitched for the late lamented Washington Senators. (Check out the 1958 film version of Damn Yankees to see him throwing for Washington against the Yanks.) These days in Miami, where he's resided since 1960, he scouts Latin-American hopefuls for the Dodgers. At age 66 he's still living the béisbol dream.

Best Charity

Food for Life Network

It's pretty tough to argue with an outfit that feeds the HIV-positive among us. But throw in a few twists -- say, delivering groceries to those who are not ambulatory, providing foodstuffs to victims' families, and even catering home-cooked meals for those who are too sick to cook -- and you've got one dedicated charity. Indeed Food for Life Network not only nourishes, it nurtures. Through referral programs and its own nutritional services and counseling departments, the organization follows its clients to ensure they're not only fed but are proactive enough to tackle HIV before it balloons into AIDS. The group also sponsors fundraisers, events, and food drives to raise both community awareness and resources. So in the end, the thirteen-year-old Food for Life Network deserves kudos for more than cooking. It gets praise for persistence, perseverance, and very dedicated personnel.

Best Fish Tank

Seahorse Bar at Beach House Bal Harbour

The bar's name blatantly announces what placidly swims in the showcase aquarium: live sea horses. The gracefully curved creatures add whimsy to the long, narrow lounge and give new meaning to the term captive audience. The tiny fish bedazzle barflies who are gulping martinis as if they were downing water. Kudos to the hotel's owners, the Rubell family, for deciding against stocking the tank with the other animals also known as sea horses -- walruses.

Best New Performance Space

lab6

From postmodern tributes to the Cuban orisha Babalu Aye to the monthly "hood crawl" through Little Havana, the artists at lab6 have taken up a kind of anti-gentrification of Little Havana. Never content to confine art to the walls, visual artists Carlos Suarez de Jesus and Vivian Marthell traffic in the wacky and disturbing, often inviting dancers and other conspirators to make this space more than just a gallery. The outdoor stairs leading from the exhibition space on the ground floor to the performance loft upstairs make the surrounding neighborhood part of the show. As more conservative elements attempt to make Calle Ocho and its environs ever friendlier for tourists, count on lab6 to keep the street alienating -- but in a good way.

Best Sanctuary From The Fast Track

Simpson Park Hammock

Enter deep into this eight-acre native hardwood hammock and become a witness to the past in all its former glory, a time when banyan, pigeon plums, velvet seed, gumbo limbo, and Gulf licaria trees covered the Brickell area. The park has been undergoing restoration for several months (pesky foreign plants had threatened to wipe out the fragile native flora) and will reopen to the public this month. Here you can escape the concretized, high-stress world we've created and take respite in the world as it should be.

Best Local Artist

Edouard Duval-Carrié

Since moving to Miami in 1992, painter, sculptor, and installation artist Edouard Duval-Carrié has forged some of the city's most enduring symbols. Ailing souls in the waiting room of Overtown's Jefferson Reeves Health Center can find temporary relief in the artist's renderings of vodou sirens and snakewomen that float in an ethereal sea of green across the atrium above their heads. Earlier this year art enthusiasts who visited the two-day show in the now-demolished Espirito Santo Bank building on Brickell found a strong political statement among the sand and sequins of the Haitian-born artist's "INS cemetery." While Duval-Carrié plays an important role in populating Miami's public spaces with sensuous and socially significant images, his worldwide reputation brings much needed prestige to our local visual culture. In collections and exhibitions from Port-au-Prince to Paris, from São Paulo to New York, Duval-Carrié's body of work challenges the limiting characterization of Caribbean-influenced art as "primitive" or "naive" without ever losing sight of the profound resources provided him by Haitian history and popular culture.

Best Nonprofit

Grubstake Resources for Recovery

Since opening in October, the grassroots Grubstake has helped an estimated 150 women, many of them drug-addicted prostitutes who prowled Biscayne Boulevard for tricks, right their upturned lives. Grubstake and its companion thrift store, Good & Funky, are the brainchild of Heather Klinker, who gave up a lucrative job in promotions to launch this venture. Klinker knows whereof she speaks; she's a recovered alcoholic. But among the nonprofits that help the poor, Klinker and her colleagues are anything but impersonal paper-pushers. They help their charges navigate the maze of social service agencies, rehabs, and job placement. They'll give someone a ride to a clinic, or help a woman who is kicking her habit furnish a new apartment with donated furniture. It's the attention to detail that makes her operation stand out. Recently Klinker helped a young addict get a truck out of hock at the impound lot, and brought money to a jailed transvestite so he could buy razors to keep up appearances.

Best Banquet Hall

Coral Gables Woman's Club

This venerable coral-rock edifice is on the National Register of Historic Places, and deservedly so. Built in 1935, it features numerous stately bas-reliefs on its pockmarked walls, and a fountain alive with sculpted sea creatures. Indoors the club has two large meeting halls, one with terrazzo floors and murals of roseate spoonbills, the other with a lofty ceiling and impressive fireplaces. If you're planning a medium-size wedding, reception, quince, or graduation party, this place beats the hell out of any top-of-the-strip-mall joint, and has more of a rustic, Old Florida touch than your fancy-schmantzy hotel ballrooms.

Best Candidate For Urban Renewal

NW 79th Street between NW Tenth and NW 27th avenues

What's up with this boulevard through nowhere? It's sort of like taking a trip down a rural Southern road, where all you see are tarpaper shacks, junk, and mud. This stretch of pavement remains countrified, but with a touch of strip mall here and there. Maybe someone tried to develop the area and just gave up. Vacant, weed-choked lots run for blocks, broken up by fragments of fences and trailer parks, or the battered and rotted remnants of what might have been nice little settlements 30 years ago. It's pretty obvious this tract has been officially ghettoized when just about the only buildings not boarded up are a Church's Fried Chicken, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a Popeye's Fried Chicken, and a roadside barbecue joint -- also a few mom-and-pop markets and a few churches. Add the used-car lots, check-cashing windows, and junkyards, and you've got yourself a genuine wasteland.

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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