By Madison Rutherford | Photography by Angelina Aragon
PHOENIX magazine’s Best of the Valley turns 24 this summer. (Feel old yet?) To honor more than two decades of our annual celebration of top-shelf people, places and things in metro Phoenix, we took a stroll through the magazine’s archives to unearth a quintet of impressively preserved milestone issues, wax nostalgic about bygone local businesses and chuckle about our past design and editorial choices – ultimately proving just how far we’ve come, both as a publication and a city.
August 2000
Our inaugural BOV issue featured 250 readers’ picks and 60 editor-supplied superlatives in Greater Phoenix – some with now-questionable verbiage, including Best Pick-Up Joint (After Hours at Phoenix Art Museum), Best Foo-Foo Drink (oatmeal cookie martini at now-defunct Downtown piano bar Amsterdam) and Best Shoot-the-Wad Restaurant (The Phoenician’s former rooftop fine-dining destination Mary Elaine’s). Dearly departed cornerstones of the Valley’s burgeoning culinary landscape – Barmouche, RoxSand Restaurant and Cowboy Ciao – also live on through patinated pages.
August 2004
Luis Gonzalez, that year’s Best D-back, adorned the magazine’s first sports-themed Best of the Valley cover. Other winners were very telling of the time, like Postino clinching Best Place to Forget About the Atkins Diet. But some things never change: Bikini Lounge’s Best Jukebox designation still holds true, as does the line “where Missy Elliott and Alan Jackson, The Doobie Brothers and Morphine can coexist.”
October 2015
The model featured on our first food-centric BOV cover was the stacked Belly Buster Burger (five half-pound Angus chuck patties separated by four slices of cheddar cheese and topped with two fried eggs) at Wimpy’s Paradise, a Chandler hamburger joint that closed its doors in 2018. Showcasing 319 of our favorite things across 48 pages, the issue was “our largest ever PHOENIX magazine cover story not called Top Docs,” EIC Craig Outhier wrote in his editor’s note.
October 2016
The mag’s illustrated BOV cover debut introduced an “unnamed Best of the Valley superhero” conceived by Tucson artist Zijun Li. The coverline: “Up, up and away with 333 of our favorite things,” including perennials like Tempe Camera, Changing Hands and Clever Koi, plus a whole herd of Valley mascots like Instagram-famous Miss Poppy the Pig and a pair of albino peafowl at A Tropical Concept Plant Nursery in South Phoenix.
August 2017
Though Alice Cooper graced its cover, he wasn’t the only Valley VIP featured in our 17th annual BOV issue – “hip historian” Marshall Shore was crowned Best Bespectacled Phoenix Celebrity, while Yetta Gibson’s chic pixie cut gained superstar status as Best Iconic Newscaster Look That’s Not Mark Curtis’ Mustache.
