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.

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.

At Echo & Rig, the stylish new steakhouse and butcher shop at Tivoli Village, steel-cut oatmeal is available near the host stand for $17 a tin. It’s hard to believe that anyone who would come here with a taste for prime rib would leave with an offensively priced breakfast staple.

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.

Submitted: Water boss Pat Mulroy both enabled heedless growth and was our most effective government official. Discuss.

The All-Togethers are more like hillbilly jazz that blends everything from classic bluegrass to … Lady Gaga covers?At first glance, it’s like a cliché come true: small, folksy band playing a bar in small, folksy Boulder City. Add Ken Osborne’s wool pants, his wife Cindy Osborne’s stand-up bass and drummer Brian Phipps’ washboard resting against the wall, and suddenly Mumford & Sons don’t seem so precious.

The blossoming of cocktail culture has given rise to many liquor trends. But sometimes the new sensation is an old tradition, like mezcal.

Sampling the culinary traditions of Israel, Iran, India and beyond reveals countless variations in the valley (usually with a kick of heat)I’m convinced there’s an art to skewering and grilling meat. Consider the care and thought that goes into a koobideh kabob, for instance.