Best Wine Bar Cha Champagne and Wine Bar.Best Shrimp Dish Fins' Salt and Pepper Shrimp.Best Gay-Friendly Restaurant Jenni's Noodle House.Best Vegetarian-Friendly Restaurant Udipi.Best Comfort Food Restaurant Zelko Bistro.Best Soul Food Restaurant Zydeco Louisiana Diner.Best Oysters Little Pappas Seafood House.Best Indian Restaurant Shri Balaji Bhavan.Best Mom and Pop Restaurant Luigi's Pizzeria.Best Chicken-Fried Steak Beaver's Ice House.Glee Town The Tommy Tune Awards nurture young performers.Best Student Theater Production The Drowsy Chaperone by Episcopal High School.Best Place to Drink With an Oilman Petroleum Club.Best Bar - Midtown Nouveau Antique Art Bar.Best Art Show Group Show, Lawndale Art Center.Best Club for Out-of-Town Acts Warehouse Live.Best Club for Local Acts Super Happy Fun Land.Best Museum Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts.Best Strip Club Michael's International.Best Local Filmmaker Johnette Duff, screenwriter/director of Up & Down.
Best Theater Production for Children Children's Hilltop Theatre Festival.
Best Blues Club The Bronze Peacock Room at House of Blues.Main Street's abiding professionalism - its ability to do so much within a space that's so little - is the essence of great theater. Even Lans Traverse's clunker of an American premiere, Driftwood (whose fragrant title promised so much more), couldn't dampen the season. Magical realism was laid on hot and heavy for Caridad Svich's world-premiere English adaptation of Isabel Allende's sprawling South American family saga The House of the Spirits, while the diva of all divas, Maria Callas, was conjured up for us, warts and all, in Terrence McNally's Master Class. Alfred Uhry's The Last Night of Ballyhoo, a heartfelt comic tale of upwardly mobile Jews in pre-WW II Atlanta, was brilliantly detailed. What a joy to experience (probably for the only time) Sophie Treadwell's rarely performed Machinal (1928), a chilling - and classic - indictment of faceless 1920s society. Throughout the season, Main Street has produced all its shows with a lustrous dexterity that belies its pint-size venue, keeping us close and thoroughly enthralled. That it also imbues such a magical play with clarity, intelligence and a bit of self-serving charm is pure icing. Any theater group that can produce such a robust mounting of Tom Stoppard's dense and rich Arcadia is number one in our view.