1. “Heritage declares there is still something to be done with the American steakhouse,” wrote Brock Radke in our December issue, awarding Tom Colicchio’s Heritage Steak in the Mirage our coveted Restaurant of the Year Award.

If you can gauge a man’s sincerity by how doggedly he returns to his core message, R. Byron Stringer is utterly focused on helping people, particularly troubled kids.

Food & Drink Art & Culture Shops & Services Outtakes Best big-screen movie theater XD, South Point Cinemascope, Cinerama, Dimension 150 … those great wide-screen formats of yore are gone with the wind. But if you want to recreate the experience of seeing a cinema spectacle on a mind-blowingly large screen, try the XD one at South Point.

In the pop-culture memescape, he’s best known for predicting the eventual fusion of man and machine — at last, the belly-button USB port we’ve always wanted! — but there’s more to Ray Kurzweil than Skynet-friendly futurism. Dude’s in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Food & Drink Shops & Services Leisure, Family & Fun Outtakes Best headliner Taylor Hicks The fifth-season “American Idol” winner’s success story actually began in Las Vegas. Stranded in New Orleans the night before Hurricane Katrina and unable to return home to Birmingham, Ala.

Food & Drink Art & Culture Leisure, Family & Fun Outtakes Best place to get away from it all 23rd Floor Lobby at Mandarin Oriental Hotel A feeling of serenity settles over you once you’ve ensconced yourself in the 23rd floor lobby (that’s right) of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. From far above the Strip, you can enjoy its vistas yet feel comfortably removed from its hurly-burly, and the staff is the essence of solicitude.

Well, they voted in our online Best of the City poll. Here are selected results, in artisinal, locally sourced, nonconflict charticles.

Shops & Services Art & Culture Leisure, Family & Fun Outtakes Best coffee Grouchy John’s Maybe you get a little extra buzz knowing you’re supporting a homegrown biz instead of appeasing the all-powerful Starbucks fix. Fine.

First, thanks to the 600 of you who participated in our online poll for this Best of the City Issue. Second, thanks to the 463 of you who voted in the category Best! Thing! Ever! in Las Vegas.

Modern technology is great. It’s brought us smartphones, a fine and growing corpus of funny cat videos, and augmented-reality computer glasses from the future so we can, I don’t know, tweet with our eyes or something.