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Photo by Cathy Pinsky
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Well, eager Westchesterites, here it is again: our highly anticipated and hotly debated annual “Best of Westchester” issue. The best, the very best that Westchester has to offer you, oodles of winners in cocktails, curries, home décor, hardware, and then almost 300 other categories we don’t have space for here. They all deserve a hearty congratulations.
I’ll let you in on a little secret from behind the glossy photos, though: the issue gives my editors and me headaches and nightmares. Why? Well, we’ve set a pretty high bar for ourselves, delivering to you the very best the county provides, and we worry ’cause the responsibility feels enormous
After all, what does it mean to be the “best”? We know our children are the best. Our great-aunt’s cheesecake. Sgt. Pepper (on vinyl). These are the people and places in our lives that mean the most to us. They’re personal in the most powerful sense, and our conviction about their “best”-ness is among our most strongly held beliefs.
It’s no surprise, then, that we get in trouble nearly every time we say anything is the best. (It is, after all, a four-letter word.) We’re still hunched over our keyboards, writing editors’ responses to our May cover story, the “21 Best Looking Residents.” So how do we say, with such conviction, that what follows in these pages are the Best of Westchester? Well, we do a lot of sampling and trying, comparing and debating. We get a lot of recommendations from a lot of recognized experts, and we rely on a lot of votes from the most qualified experts we know: you.
We hope that what we—you included—have come up with meets that high standard we set for ourselves. The editors and the writers and the readers together came up with an expansive list with “Best of” winners for almost every interest, love, and region, and it makes the headaches more than worth all the bicarb and Tylenol.
Sure, we’ve been doing this long enough to know that the concept of the “Best” will always be a little bit subjective, but over the years, we’ve recognized hundreds and hundreds of the finest, purest, prettiest, and most outstanding that Westchester offers its residents and visitors alike. And we are a pretty outstanding county, are we not? The list, we like to think, is a bit of a love song to the whole fair parcel of land year-after-year, highlighted in our pages or not.
We may not have your great-aunt’s cheesecake (unless she whips it up at one our famous bakeries), but we’re pretty darned sure that we’ve got one of your treasured bests somewhere in this list. So turn to page 55 and see if your favorites made it.
And, if they did not, don’t worry. We’ll never get tired of finding new things to love here in Westchester, and we’re going to keep writing about every little item we find. After all, as long as you’re here living and loving, we’ll want to be, too.
Esther Davidowitz
Editor-in-Chief
