Best of Austin 2025
The Austin Chronicle has been crowning the city’s best every year since 1981. This is the Austin Lifestyles read on the 2025 edition — with full credit to the Chronicle’s editorial team for the underlying picks.
Every spring the Austin Chronicle drops its annual Best of Austin issue, and every spring we read it the way some people read the Sunday paper — with a coffee, a pen, and a quiet conversation about what they got right and what they missed. The Chronicle has been doing this since 1981, which means there are now 45 years of Best of Austin lists stacked up — an editorial archive of how this city’s idea of itself has changed across nearly half a century.
This desk has been on the Austin scene since 1979 — here for the first Best of Austin in 1981, and for every wave since: the cosmic cowboy years, the Slacker years, the dot-com years, the SXSW boom, the post-2010 tech rush, the 2020 Joe Rogan moment, and whatever this current era will be called when somebody writes its history. The Chronicle has chronicled all of it. Their list every year is a little time capsule of where Austin is at.
Read the actual Chronicle list at calendar.austinchronicle.com/best-of/2025. They did the work of picking. This page is the companion read — the history of the awards, how they work, and where to find our deep coverage of each beat the winners come from.
The Beats the Winners Come From
The Chronicle’s categories sweep across the whole city — food and drink, music and nightlife, neighborhoods and city life, tech and business, culture and media. Each of those beats has a dedicated site in our network with year-round coverage that goes deeper than a one-line caption ever could.
Deeper Coverage Across the WholeTech Network
Each of these niche sites covers one slice of Austin life. Click into the one that matches your interest.
Institutional Memory
A few of the Chronicle’s perennial categories overlap with ground this network has covered for decades. Austin coworking? We’ve documented it since 2009, back when Conjunctured (born July 2008) was one of the first fifty coworking spaces in the world. Austin coffee? We ran the Wi-Fi at one of South Congress’s most famous coffee institutions during the early-Twitter era. Austin podcasting? austincast.com has tracked the scene since long before Joe Rogan moved to town in 2020 and validated the whole thing.
That institutional memory is the lens we bring to each year’s list — not a substitute for the Chronicle’s coverage, but a longer runway behind it.
Looking for the Current Cycle?
Nominations for the 2026 awards are open now. See how the process works and cast your vote.
Best of Austin 2026 →