Queen City Nerve - November 20, 2024

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BY RYAN PITKIN

Six years in business. I guess we’re really doing this thing.

When Justin LaFrancois and I took a leap of faith in late 2018, announcing we would be launching a new alt-weekly by Charlotte’s 250th birthday in December of that year, there was no telling how long we might last. Hell, I spent the first three or four years of this passion project wondering if we would last through the next six months.

The fact that we are still here and actually stable enough for me to take confidence in the future of our business is a testament to how hungry this city is for good community-centered news, cultural coverage, and different takes on the happenings of the Queen City.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you there’s nothing going on in Charlotte, that only means they’re not looking.

This year has brought some rough patches for our city, with the tragic mass murder of four police officers and US Marshals in April; our state, which saw Hurricane Helene absolutely decimate landscapes, lives and businesses throughout the western North Carolina mountains; and the country, with the arrival of a second Trump administration placing us on the verge of becoming an oligarchic fascist state.

But still, our annual Best in the Nest is about looking back on the year that also saw a lot of great shit go down and a ton of people busting their ass to make sure our city continues to be a hub for culture, community and cuisine.

Months of work have gone into this issue, and I’ve spent the last week working into the early morning every night to ensure that it is the best issue we’ve put together in our six years of existence.

Reading over it now before we send it off, I’m fully confident that we have succeeded in doing so.

Each year I make it a point in this introductory Editor’s Note to emphasize that what follows is not about gatekeeping. All takes are subjective and just because we name one thing the “Best” of any category doesn’t mean there aren’t a dozen others working in the same field, medium, or industry who are doing great things as well.

That’s why I think of this issue as more of a year-end guide to everything that we thought was awesome about 2024 as a team of journalists who make it our mission to spend all year seeking out such things.

The people, businesses, organizations and establishments named in the pages to come are worth your time and exploration. The hope is that, while doing so, you’ll run into any number of others doing similar work, because that’s how community builds.

As always, I must wrap this up by thanking my business partner, publisher Justin LaFrancois, and the great team behind us, without whom this issue — nor any other we’ve printed this year — would be possible.

Our staff and contributors have worked tirelessly to put together our most comprehensive Best in the

Nest issue yet. I couldn’t be more thankful for their work.

Best in the Nest Contributors: Annie Keough, Dezanii Lewis, Aerin Spruill, Sam Spencer, Kayleigh Ruller, Hannah Goldman, Alex Holladay, Jeff Hahne, Karie Simmons, Matt Cosper, Jonathan Golian, Tyler Bunzey, and Larken Egleston.

Plus reporting from: Rayne Antrim, Perry Tannenbaum, Michaela Catoe, Candice Kelly, Pat Moran, Darrell Horwitz, Bo McMillan, Nellie Shortreed, Davis Cuffe, Dan Russell-Pinson and Arin Garcia McCormack.

And photos by: Jayme Johnson, Grant Baldwin, Taylor Banner, Ryan Allen, Rico Marcelo, Robert Delk, Dan Russell-Pinson, Billy Collins, Michaela Catoe, Teenie Harris, Matt Cosper, Perry Tannenbaum, Becky Schultz, Graham Morrison, Madison Leigh King, Gregory Moore, Brittany Nailon and JW Haugh.

There are many more folks who have contributed to our publication and helped us out over the past year and I’m appreciative to each and every one of them. Here’s to a kick-ass 2025.

RPITKIN@QCNERVE.COM

CRITICS’ PICKS: CITY LIFE

Every day there are folks working hard to ensure a better future for our city. This is for them.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: J’Tanya Adams

Having grown up a sharecropper’s daughter in the Steele Creek area of southwest Charlotte, J’Tanya Adams moved to Seversville in adulthood, where she worked with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership to help educate her neighbors in the Historic West End about critical info that could keep them from falling victim to gentrification.

She went on to found the Historic West End Partners, a nonprofit organization through which she has helped revive the corridor with development projects like Mosaic Village, creation of public spaces such as Five Points Plaza, beautification projects with local artists, and projects that address food insecurity along the corridor, including the launch of Thrive Food Hub this year and the anticipated grocery co-op Adams has been working for years to make a reality.

As we’ve done reporting in the West End over the years, it has remained apparent that Adams’ presence remains even in projects she’s not directly involved with. A recent example came in July as we talked to Greg Willingham about the long-anticipated opening of Rozzelle’s Ferry Landing, a cluster of businesses anchored by a music venue that aims to serve as a community hub in the Historic West End.

As we chatted about the project, Willingham mentioned in passing that, if it weren’t for Adams, the project wouldn’t have even come to the West End. She was the one who gave Willingham and business partner Keith Anderson a history lesson about the corridor, emphasizing what the new communal space could mean for residents who have gone from disinvestment to witnessing gentrification.

“Honestly, we were looking at a completely different place, because we just knew we needed a home,” Willingham recalled. “And when [Adams] approached us on it and gave us the history of the area, what the area used to look like years ago, it just resonated with me and my partner.”

Adams remains a true community advocate who works with the best interests of her Historic West End neighbors every day.

BY

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: J’TANYA ADAMS

PHOTO

GRANT BALDWIN

LOCAL HERO: Kirsten D. Sikkelee

From waiting tables at Carpe Diem after graduating from Davidson College to growing the YWCA Central Carolinas as a staff member and later CEO, Kirsten Sikkelee has lived and breathed Charlotte for decades.

Though she’s stepping down as CEO at the end of this year, her legacy will continue to live on in critical facilities for women and families facing homelessness in Charlotte — and in a vocal, organization-wide commitment to antiracism. At this year’s We Believe luncheon benefiting YWCA, Sikkelee received multiple standing ovations for her three decades of service to the community, an appropriate honor for someone committing to sharing the spotlight and using her privilege to platform others.

Sikkelee has promised to stay on as the YWCA completes a major affordable housing development, partnering with DreamKey Partners to transform the front lawn of YWCA’s 10-acre property on Park Road into more than affordable housing units that will be reserved for households earning 30%-60% area median income.

“In recent years, it’s become more and more challenging for individuals to find affordable housing. People are moving outside of the city, and they are commuting from far away. They should be able to live in Charlotte if they work in Charlotte,” Sikkelee said of the project.

BEST TWITTER ACCOUNT: @Tyre_94

This will likely be the last time we include the Best Twitter Account category in our Best in the Nest, as Elon Musk has turned the site into a cesspool of misinformation, right-wing hate and weird contentfarmer accounts.

Yet there are still those carrying on the good fight, like @Tyre_94, aka W.E.B. DaBoi, who bills himself as “a hater first and anti-imperialist second.” Replace the band on the deck of the Titanic with a comedian and you have Tyre, whose hilarious tweets are a mix of hopeless romanticism, antifascism, booze and cocaine. It’s just the right level of debauchery to take us on our last lap around the sun — on Twitter, we mean, not this planet. This ol’ rock still has a half-decade left.

BEST INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT: @_charlotteeast

Operated by the nonprofit CharlotteEAST, an organization with a mission to “develop and strengthen social and economic capital in East Charlotte by elevating the collective voice of its people...” the @_charlotteeast Instagram page isn’t just shouting out local businesses and passing along old news from other outlets. Instead, they focus on bringing timely, thoughtful and well-explained information to a nuanced and rapidly changing area with arguably the city’s most diverse community makeup.

The page is education-focused, blending history lessons with civics and a clear goal of uplifting and supporting the businesses and people it serves. Whether you’re an East Charlotte local or not, the @_charlotteeast page is worth a follow for quality CLT content.

BEST TIKTOK ACCOUNT: @madihendrix

Charlotte-based barista Madi Hendrix posts creative coffee concoctions to her TikTok account, gaining her 80,000 followers who tune in to see what she’s going to blend up next from the tiny space behind the counter at Burr & Berry Coffee in lower South End. Her most popular video featuring the recipe behind an iced cheesecake latte with cherry cold foam gathered more than three million likes.

BEST PODCAST: ‘Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast About Disability’ by Laura Stinson

“The only disability in life is a bad attitude.” Laura Stinson calls bullshit. The artist and host of Bad

Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast About Disability, isn’t having any of that faux inspirational crap. Stinson was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease, a genetic disease that has required the use of a wheelchair since she was 4 years old.

The Bad Attitudes podcast combines Stinson’s gallows sense of humor and strong language to discuss contentious topics like ableism, what constitutes a disability and the history of disability in America and elsewhere. Stinson points out that she could have such a good attitude that she “sprouts a unicorn horn” from her forehead, but it’s still not going to get her up a flight of stairs.

“I don’t want to inspire people because I’m disabled,” Stinson said. “If you want to be inspired by something I actually do and accomplish, great, but don’t associate it with my disability.”

BEST REPORTER: Ann Doss Helms

For 32 years with the Charlotte Observer and the past five with WFAE, Ann Doss Helms covered Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools and other local education topics inside and out. Since following many of her former colleagues to Charlotte’s NPR station, she also demonstrated why she’s one of the best investigative journalists in Charlotte.

This year she tracked down private “schools” that were taking state voucher money even though there was no evidence their Potemkin Pupils ever attended class and investigated the school system’s coverup of public documents related to student sexual assault cases. With her retirement earlier this year, the Charlotte media market lost an irreplaceable amount of institutional memory and expertise on the schools beat, and given the state of local media, it’s unlikely we’ll ever have a local education expert like Helms ever again.

BEST PHOTOGRAPHER: Laura Stroud

If you’ve been to a sporting event in Charlotte, odds are Laura Stroud was nearby taking pictures. Stroud (@LensByLaura on Instagram) is the creative content producer for the Carolina Ascent, Charlotte Independence and Anthem Rugby Carolina as well as a freelancer who has shot everything from Division I college athletics at Campbell University, to NWSL and MLS.

When she’s not shooting sports, Laura does everything from graduation photos to portraits to events. Though we couldn’t confirm before this issue went to press, we assume she sleeps every now and then as well.

BEST BOOK (NONFICTION):

‘Our Trespasses’ by Greg Jarrell

Many Charlotte natives know the Second Ward of Charlotte, but too few of them know its history. In the 1960s, the neighborhood of Brooklyn, known as “a city within a city,” was a hub for Black businesses and neighborhoods. In the name of so-called urban renewal, the neighborhood was razed to the ground.

Greg Jarrell explores this history in his book, Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods, released in February. The Black residents who were displaced still suffer the repercussions of these events.

“Half a century later, on any given night there are now more Black people interned in the Mecklenburg County Detention Center, built on ‘renewed’ Brooklyn land, than there are Black residents living in what was once one of the preeminent Black enclaves of the Southeast,” Bo McMillan wrote in his Queen City Nerve review.

Jarrell’s book not only documents the demolition of Brooklyn, but the role that white churches played in its demise. And because this story is not unique, the book also addresses other Black neighborhoods that met identical fates across the United States.

“‘To redeem is to buy back, to release from a debt, to dissolve a lien, to clear from distress, to end a captivity,’ Jarrell writes. This holds true not just for the community of Brooklyn, but for all the city of Charlotte haunted by Brooklyn’s renewal through its

LOCAL HERO: KIRSTEN D. SIKKELEE PHOTO COURTESY OF YWCA

BEST NONFICTION BOOK: OUR TRESPASSES PHOTO COURTESY OF FORTRESS PRESS

form as a city still cloven apart — haves and havenots, Ballantyne and Beatties Ford, homeowners and the housing unstable.”

BEST RADIO HOSTS: Mac & Bone

Having worked together for nearly two decades and co-hosted mornings on WFNZ together since 2009, Chris McClain and Travis “T-Bone” Hancock have built a certain rapport that has helped countless Charlotte-area sports fans cope with all the struggles of rooting for cellar-dwelling teams. How else could you explain the fact that the duo stays atop the Nielsen ratings books despite talking sports in a market that is home to the Charlotte Hornets and Carolina Panthers. What product has either team put on the field or court in recent years that justifies such support?

These two bright-spirited co-hosts who have served as grief counselors to so many suffering sports fans over the years suffered their own devastating loss that goes deeper than sports this year when longtime caller and friend Mark Baker, aka Mark from Gastonia, succumbed to cancer. During that hard-fought battle, however, Mac & Bone did everything they could to drum up support for Mark from around the Carolinas, letting him know in his last months that he was loved by sports fans everywhere.

Also, if you follow the show, you know that the real beauty comes off the mic, as Mac’s postPanthers-win dances are so indescribably off beat that you’re just going to have to seek them out yourself for a good laugh.

BEST COMMUNITY ORGANIZING: People’s Budget Coalition

A wide-ranging coalition of 16 community organizations came together to detail their proposal for the Fiscal Year 2025 City of Charlotte budget this year, calling for criminal justice reform, better pay for city workers and a $100-million investment in housing.

Comprising local advocacy groups, faith leaders, service providers, community organizations and concerned citizens working toward “a people-first vision” for Charlotte, the People’s Budget Coalition (PBC) released a list of core demands for the city to consider in putting together the FY2025 budget. The demands were rooted in three principles: (1) Great neighborhoods (2) Safe communities and (3) Wellmanaged government.

“We believe in care, dignity, and justice, and seek a budget that provides for everyone while centering those too often left behind or out,” read a statement from the coalition upon its formation in April. “We believe that advocating as a collective voice will help set the agenda for local government to better meet the needs of the community and deliver better outcomes for everyone.”

Come June, when the budget was approved, Charlotte City Council didn’t meet all of the PBC’s demands, but some, like the increase in funding for affordable housing and a promise that 25% of that will go to affordable homeownership programs, did make it in.

BEST COMMUNITY ORGANIZER: Joi Mayo, Transforming Nations Ford

Joi Mayo, president of the Kings Creek Association, joined with area organizers such as Virginia Keogh of the Southwest Area Neighborhood Coalition this year to launch Transforming Nations Ford, a coalition of community members advocating for southwest Charlotte’s 28273, 28277, 28217, and 28210 zip codes along the Nations Ford and Arrowood Road corridors.

“The vision of Transforming Nations Ford is to create environments that empower individuals to reach their full potential while fostering a deep sense of belonging and interconnectedness,” Mayo says. “Our ultimate goal is to inspire lasting positive change, ensuring that every member of the Nations Ford/Arrowood corridor can thrive and contribute meaningfully to the collective well-being of our community.”

Transforming Nations Ford is currently lobbying Charlotte City Council and other local officials to to help turn a piece of city-owned land into a park and incubator space for local nonprofits. The parcel, located at 7600 England Street off East Arrowood Road, was donated to the city in 2020, and for years neighbors have been asking that the city do something useful with the property.

More recently, the group has advocated for the development of a regional recreation center at Ramblewood Park to help address the community needs at the center of Transforming Nations Ford: economic challenges, linguistic isolation, community violence, educational gaps, health and safety.

BEST COLLABORATIVE EFFORT: Charlotte Is Home Center

Community leaders with ourBRIDGE for KIDS, Charlotte Community Health Clinic, and Carolina Migrant Network came together on April 12 to kick off construction at what is now the site of the Charlotte is Home Center, an umbrella facility that will host services from all three organizations.

The first-of-its-kind facility in the region offers low-cost health services, pro-bono immigration legal services, civic engagement programming, educational resources and other wraparound services to the local refugee and immigrant communities in east Charlotte.

“I really see this moment as historical for not only Charlotte but really on a national level,” Carolina Migrant Network co-founder Becca O’Neill said when construction kicked off in April. “We have excellent community-based health care services, childcare and after-school services, and immigration legal services all combined, coming together in the same space, which is something we’re told over and over again by communities is something they need.”

The center opened its doors in August with a soft launch on Oct. 1.

BEST ENTREPRENEUR: Sonja Nichols

Entrepreneurs often know their endgame when they set out to accomplish a task, but that wasn’t the case for Sonja Nichols, owner of Southern Lion. When she visited the Charlotte staple Blacklion after hearing that it was for sale, she only then discovered her purpose.

“I’m like, ‘Okay, I don’t know why God sent me down here, but I think I’m supposed to help you all find a home,’” Nichols told Queen City Nerve.

SONJA NICHOLS (CENTER)

PHOTO COURTESY OF TRIPWIRE

BEST COLLABORATIVE EFFORT: CHARLOTTE IS HOME CENTER PHOTO COURTESY OF CAROLINA MIGRANT NETWORK

Nichols opened Southern Lion, a portmanteau of the business’s two inspirations, Southern Christmas Show and Blacklion, in 2023 as a popup vendor market in the former Sears space in Pineville’s Carolina Place Mall, just a mile away from the original Blacklion location on Park Road.

Since then, she has turned the pop-up into a permanent marketplace, hosting more than 150 vendors in the 82,500-square-foot space. In describing the store, Nichols proudly described how Southern Lion has become a one-stop shop for folks interested in browsing and patronizing local merchants.

“This is a shopaholic’s happy space because all they have to do is just walk around, and then all these merchants are bringing stuff from all over the world. They can go look at it in one location,” said Nichols. “Then they got the nerve to change the merchandise every other day, or at least once a week.”

So now you’ll have to go back. The nerve on these vendors.

BEST TECHIE: Enovia Bedford

The tech industry is a predominantly white- and male-dominated industry, so it’s rare when people get to experience a Black woman successfully taking up space within it. Black women and other

marginalized groups so often see themselves pushed to the background, their contributions overlooked — but Enovia Bedford says that’s exactly why she’s here.

“There’s so much room for growth in tech, and I’m excited to be a part of making it a more inclusive and innovative field for everyone,” she told Queen City Nerve.

As the founder of Vett Deck, an event marketing platform, she has made it her mission to create inclusive spaces for anyone who needs assistance with raising capital, hosting events or other entrepreneurial duties. She has also worked as North Carolina’s Grow with Google digital coach, a position she’s held for three years, teaching businesses how to grow and scale using Google Tools.

“Seeing more Black women founders in tech leadership roles, in engineering, design, marketing, sales — across the board — is essential,” Bedford said. “It breaks down barriers and shows young girls coming up that this is a space for them too. When we have diverse perspectives in the room, we come up with richer solutions and create a more powerful impact.”

BEST ACTIVIST/ADVOCATE ORGANIZATION: Freedom Fighting Missionaries

As founder and executive director of Freedom Fighting Ministries, Kenny Robinson this year spearheaded the purchase of two acres in University City that will host his organization’s first housing development for justice-involved families, a historic milestone for the city of Charlotte.

The $1 million land deal, finalized on Feb. 29, makes Freedom Fighting Missionaries (FFM) the first Black-founded reentry organization in Charlotte to own land and create housing for public use. The news came after FFM was awarded $2 million in funding by Charlotte City Council in September 2023, plus another $2 million from Mecklenburg County to create supportive housing for individuals reentering society after incarceration and those who have been impacted by the justice system.

“I know how it feels to come home from prison and have to start from scratch,” Robinson said upon closing the land deal.

“Now, I am able to support those that are reentering society so that they can start fresh with sustainable services and viable resources along with a roof over their heads.”

BEST ACTIVIST/ADVOCATE: Shann Fulton, Charlotte Black Pride

Born in Savannah and raised in a small town in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, Charlotte Black Pride (CBP) Chair Shann Fulton (they/he) grew up in an environment that felt far from any open conversations about sexual orientation and gender expression. But, as Fulton was raised on the saying “A closed mouth don’t get fed,” they eventually became more comfortable with the idea that it was time to start talking.

Being born intersex and openly queer, Fulton has always believed in educating others, especially their family members, to counteract ignorance and misinformation. After relocating to Charlotte, Fulton became aware of Charlotte Black Pride and began volunteering in 2013, eventually working their way up to serve as chair of the organization.

The three-time cancer survivor attended CBP board meetings via Zoom while in recovery. According to CBP co-founder Jermaine Nakia Lee, it’s thanks to Fulton’s efforts that CBP now has its most diverse board in the organization’s history. Lee said that, through Fulton’s leadership, CBP has made an intentional effort to ensure youth and young adults, trans and nonbinary identified individuals, people in the faith community and senior citizens are represented on the board.

“There are certain things … in life that are just part of your heart and soul. And for me, Charlotte Black Pride is one of those things,” Fulton told Queen City Nerve. “Whether or not I’m going through chemotherapy or whatever it is I’m going through, I think about the need of the people as well.”

MOST PROMISING POLITICIAN: Jordan Lopez

At just 25 years old, east Charlotte resident Jordan Lopez watched as redistricting left him without a representative in the NC House, as Tricia Cotham’s friends in the Republican Party drew her into a more friendly, conservative district. The young community advocate made the decision to step into that vacuum in an especially tumultuous election year, then faced no opposition either from his own side or from conservatives.

While it was something of a cakewalk to get to the seat, Lopez knows it will be anything but easy working from the minority (though not superminority) side of things.

When he appeared on Queen City Nerve’s Nooze Hounds podcast in July, he shared how he plans to keep the optimism despite the obstacles at the NC General Assembly. Knowing how tough it is to get spending bills past that invest in communities, Lopez said he’ll instead focus his first term on

BEST TECHIE: ENOVIA BEDFORD PHOTO COURTESY OF ENOVIA BEDFORD

BEST ACTIVIST: SHANN FULTON PHOTO COURTESY OF SHANN FULTON

MOST PROMISING POLITICIAN: JORDAN LOPEZ PHOTO COURTESY OF JORDAN LOPEZ

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building networks and connecting with colleagues in rural areas to push against the narrative that there is a rural/urban divide in North Carolina.

“Because in so much of rural North Carolina, what would benefit those communities, it would benefit east Charlotte too,” he said.

MOST CRITICAL ORG IN 2025: Carolina Migrant Network

Launched by Stefania Arteaga and Becca O’Neill in 2020 to provide free legal representation in immigration bond proceedings to individuals detained by ICE, Carolina Migrant Network (CMN) in 2022 merged with Arteaga’s advocacy organization Comunidad Colectiva, which was launched in response to the anti-immigrant rhetoric of that year’s presidential election and the xenophobic policies of the Trump administration.

Now in the lead-up to a second Trump administration, as the only nonprofit in North Carolina that offers low-cost or free immigration legal services for individuals detained by ICE, the team at Carolina Migrant Network are gearing up to be on the frontlines in the fight against Trump’s promised mass deportations.

“The presidential election results reopened a deep scar many of us had yet to fully heal from,” read a CMN release on Nov. 7. “Of course, the fear of deportation and family separation never went away, and we remained undeterred from doing what we needed to keep our folks safe. It never stopped Stefanía and our team from going out on the streets and chasing down ICE when they conducted raids and checkpoints in Charlotte, and it won’t stop us now.”

They are fighting the good fight and could use all the support the community is able to provide.

BEST YOUTH MOVEMENT: GenerationNation

GenerationNation gives young people in our community a voice in local government by organizing programs that range from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Youth Council to the student advisor on the CMS school board. Amy Farrell, the group’s (adult) executive director, has grown GenerationNation from an organization best known for launching kids voting into a powerhouse that provides leadership development for the next generation.

As the pace of change in education accelerates, the student advisor position and the Youth Council have helped the CMS Board of Education navigate

remote learning during the pandemic and the challenges of educating students in an increasingly connected, screen-heavy world. Democracy only works if every generation is engaged, and GenerationNation is doing the work to make that a reality in our community.

BEST ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZING: Historic West End Green District

West End neighbors Ronald Ross, Mattie Marshall and William Hughes formed the Historic West End Green District (HWEGD) after partnering with local sustainability nonprofit CleanAIRE NC to measure air pollution levels in several historically Black neighborhoods including the Beatties Ford Road corridor. In comparing the results with mostly white neighborhoods where industrial development was unseen, they found more air pollution in the three West End neighborhoods tested than sites in south and east Charlotte.

Today, the resident-led organization works to reduce air pollution, improve health and build a climate-resilient community through advocacy by lobbying against harmful development plans, as they successfully did in December 2023, as well as advocating for more cycling- and pedestrianfriendly infrastructure while pushing to preserve what’s left of the area’s tree canopy.

Other components of HWEGD’s work include engaging neighborhood residents in education and advocacy training, continuing to monitor local air quality with portable sensors, and implementing green infrastructure needs such as living green walls, EV charging stations, green bus shelters, strategic tree planting and solar community projects.

“A lot has changed in our community — a lot good, a lot not so good,” Ross told Queen City Nerve in January. “And whichever way it goes, we need to be involved in it and have a voice in what’s going on. People do feel left out. Things are happening and they’re not involved or engaged, so there’s that big skepticism about what’s going on and whether it’s actually a benefit for me. I live in the communities. Is it a benefit to me or is it a benefit for somebody else that’s coming into the community?”

BEST GOTV EFFORT: Clack the Vote

A collaboration between Carolinas LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce, The Freedom Center for Social Justice, and Charlotte Pride, Clack the Vote was an initiative dedicated to mobilizing and

BEST ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZING: HISTORIC WEST END GREEN DISTRICT

PHOTO BY RYAN PITKIN

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educating queer voters in the wake of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rhetoric. Organizers partnered with drag performers, the queer ballroom scene and supportive faith organizations to spread awareness and engage new or veteran voters.

The Clack the Vote initiative was nonpartisan, with the only goal to get folks out to vote, according to Bethany Corrigan, a board member of Carolinas LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce.

“We’re not going to go out there and endorse one candidate over the other,” they said. “But we are endorsing voting … Clack the Vote represents unity and solidarity, not in a partisan way, but in a way that makes people feel safe and affirmed in their decision to vote and participate in the electoral season.”

BEST SPORTS FIGURE:

Patrick Agyemang

At the start of the 2024 season, Nerve profiled Agyemang as a Charlotte FC player to watch. Though we expected big things from Big Pat’s second year, none of us could have guessed he would become the team’s starting striker and top goalscorer as

the club’s designated players came and went (or returned, in the case of prodigal Polish striker Karol Świderski).

As of this writing, Agyemang is still on a “rookie contract” for Charlotte FC, which means he’s getting paid a salary of just under $72,000 — or $5,500 per goal contribution in 2024. Compare that to Lionel Messi, who got paid a whopping $568,000 per goal or assist before exiting the playoffs on the same day as Charlotte.

While Nerve’s sources have assured us a muchdeserved new contract is on the way for Pat, we’re not worried fame or fortune will go to his head.

The humble, driven first-round MLS SuperDraft pick worked his way up from Connecticut clubs to Division III to Division I college soccer, and has no intention of stopping now.

BEST INDIE INTRAMURAL:

Charlotte Bike Polo

It was under a bridge in Charleston in 2021 that Kevin Raley and fellow members of Fixed Federation, a passionate group of fixed-gear cyclists in Charlotte, came across a sport that would kick-start the return a little-known subculture in the Queen City — one that had been dormant for years — and cultivate a new tight-knit community of cyclists who otherwise would not know each other.

The subculture around bike polo has seen a rise in popularity in Charlotte, with dozens of people showing up to pick-up games that take place twice a week, leading to the start of league play in midMarch.

As it turned out, the formation of Charlotte Bike Polo in 2021 did not mark the arrival of the sport in the city, but a resurgence. In the late-2000s, local cyclist Cory Slusher had gotten the green light from Mecklenburg County Park & Rec to renovate an abandoned tennis court at L.C. Coleman Park in west Charlotte and host bike polo matches there.

After players lobbied elected officials and other county staff, Mecklenburg County Park & Rec granted the Charlotte Bike Polo crew access to reserved courts at Sugaw Creek Recreation Center in north Charlotte, which brought more stability to the league.

“It’s a great, healthy, fun sport, and I think the younger players could jump on it and really take it to a next level,” local rider Paul Jarrells said. “I think that’s the biggest message, is that there’s a lot of room to grow.”

BEST CAUSE: Hurricane Helene Recovery

The devastating effects of Hurricane Helene made headlines around the country, but are still felt deeply here at home, many news cycles later. Watching people lose their homes and even their lives brought North Carolinians on either side of the political aisle together to help the communities most affected.

With donation spots all around town located in places like thrift stores, local parks, fire stations and YMCAs, there was no shortage of ways to help, while many in Charlotte’s creative community and other residents made DIY treks to and from Asheville, Swannanoa and the surrounding areas to get resources directly to those who needed them. The team over at Thrift Pony even used their swanky new pink bus to shuttle large quantities of donations to where they needed to go.

Social media was mobilized to direct Charlotteans to the best places to bring supplies or where to give monetary donations. Community organizers found ways to make the process both convenient for donors and massively impactful for community members of western North Carolina. The whole world watched as Charlotte made sure to help its beloved neighbors, and help it did, though the efforts continue in many parts of the area.

BEST NONPROFIT: Care Ring

When Care Ring, the longest operating low-cost health care clinic in Mecklenburg County, launched its mobile unit in December 2022, the organization called the trailer The Bridge because it served as one between health care providers and the community.

Originally located in the Grier Heights Community Center, The Bridge — which provides free health care in under-resourced neighborhoods throughout Charlotte — moved to a 7-Eleven parking lot on Wendover Road so as to see more foot traffic in May 2023.

Since its inception, the Care Ring team has

BEST SPORTS FIGURE: PATRICK AGYEMANG

PHOTO BY TAYLOR BANNER

BEST INDIE INTRAMURAL: CHARLOTTE BIKE POLO

PHOTO BY RYAN ALLEN

City Life

Critics’ Picks

formed similar relationships in other communities, including in the North End, where they have partnered with the North End Community Coalition to serve the eight neighborhoods that fall under that organization’s purview.

“Too often you just arrive somewhere and you assume that people are going to take advantage of a service that you have, and that’s not the case with us,” Tchernavia Montgomery, CEO and executive director at Care Ring, told us in January. “We want to take time to build that relationship and become a partner. We are not the experts, the neighborhood is. The people that are getting the care, they are the experts. We’re not going to do something to them or for them, we’re doing something with them.”

BEST CULTURAL PRESERVATION: Catawba Cultural Center

Dr. Wenonah G. Haire founded the Catawba Cultural Preservation Project in 1989 after a fellow tribal member of the Catawba Indian Nation told her that he was concerned for the future of the tribe, as he had noticed young people becoming disconnected from the culture.

The building that houses the Catawba Cultural Center began its life as a two-room school for Catawba children in 1948, when the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints constructed it to provide an education to Catawba children on the reservation during segregation. In the early 1990s, the school was moved from its original location to

where it sits today on Tom Steven Road. The former schoolhouse became the Catawba Cultural Center, where it has served as a hub for the tribal public ever since.

Following some key add-ons and renovations funded by federal ARPA dollars in 2020 and 2021, the center is now buzzing with activity on a daily basis, holding adult workshops, Head Start preschool classes, programming for tribal elders, outdoor educational programming and the offices of the Catawba Cultural Preservation Project. It also has a craft store with rivercane baskets, art from tribal artists and a library archiving documents, crafts, photographs, books and other invaluable pieces of Catawba ephemera.

“Over the years, there are younger generations coming in here,” Dr. Haire told Queen City Nerve in May. “I’m seeing that and this is good. I’m not ready to lay the torch down, but I feel like if I did or if I had to, it would go on. For a long time, I was really scared because I kept thinking, ‘Everybody’s off doing their own little things, and nobody’s thinking about the core of who we are as a people is our culture.’ If you don’t have your culture, you’re no more than an organization.”

BEST MOVE:

Charlotte Bilingual Preschool

When school leaders, staff, developers and community members gathered at the site of the new Charlotte Bilingual Preschool (CltBP) location in NoDa, it was with the goal of providing the school with the ability to acco mmodate 1,500 preschoolers annually by 2039.

“The dream begins now,” said Dr. Devonya Govan-Hunt, president of the CltBP Board of Directors.

Launched in 1999, Charlotte Bilingual Preschool prepares Spanish-speaking children for success in school and life by providing multicultural earlychildhood education through a 5-star licensed duallanguage preschool program. The school moved into the Hickory Grove Elementary School Annex in

2015 in response to growing demand, increasing enrollment by 50% and piloting its Creciendo Juntos program for children 0-3.

Located at 1000 Anderson St., formerly home to Plaza Road Elementary School, the move marks the first time CltBP will have a full facility to call its own. The project is supported by Mecklenburg County using funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), one of 75 local projects approved by the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners back in January utilizing $99 million in ARPA funding.

BEST EXPANSION: Block Love Charlotte Day Center

Though Deborah Phillips and the Block Love team moved into their space at the corner of Colorado Avenue and North Graham Street in the summer of 2022, this spring’s grand opening of the Block Love Charlotte Day Center marked a new chapter for the organization, which began as a meal service for people struggling with homelessness and has over time become an organization that offers wrap-around services.

Now members of the Block Love family can drop by the center to take part in free grocery giveaways, request clothing items, access the internet, take part in workforce development, seek help in the search for housing, access health care during regular site visits from Care Ring’s mobile unit and

BEST NONPROFIT: CARE RING

PHOTO BY GRANT BALDWIN

receive services from a number of other partner organizations.

“We’ve always had that need to express to people that we do more than just serve meals,” says Phillips. “I know what they see on our social media, but it’s not always easy to convey to people that we do more than meals, we do more than tents and sleeping bags. Just about everything that we’re now providing in this space, we have been providing in the streets … Being in this space and knowing that now it is tangible, they can actually visibly see it.”

MOST ANTICIPATED DEVELOPMENT/ OPENING: The Collective on Tuckaseegee

At its completion, the 13,000-square-foot Collective on Tuckaseegee complex will be home to 10 unique retail units in Enderly Park, and the first openings have given reason to believe the development could be a game changer on the west side.

In early November, The Whitaker Group announced the grand opening of APB Charlotte, a 2,000-square-foot store that aims to become a dynamic hub for skaters, streetwear enthusiasts, and cultural innovators. Located at the Collective on Tuckaseegee, APB Charlotte will serve as a retail

sister business to the APB Skatepark, which opened on the Collective property in October and bills itself as the first privately held, Black-owned, publicly accessible non-DIY skatepark in the United States.

“We’ve created APB Charlotte to be a reflection of the community we’re building here in Charlotte, a place where skate, arts, culture and streetwear can thrive together,” said James Whitner, owner and founder of The Whitaker Group, which also operates Social Status in Plaza Midwood. “We are venturing into skate wholeheartedly and hope that the community here in Charlotte can thrive off this effort. This is about giving the city a space where culture, sport and style converge, and we’re just getting started.”

Also on The Collective property on the same week that APB Charlotte opened, The Whitaker Group opened its new 38a gallery, dedicated to serving emerging and established Black, brown and minority creators with exhibits, programs, events and workshops.

MOST ANTICIPATED DEVELOPMENT/ OPENING BY A NONPROFIT: Thrive Food Hub

In July, Historic West End Partners (HWEP), a grassroots business district organization advocating for the cultural preservation and economic development of Charlotte’s Historic West End, announced the purchase of a shopping center located on Beatties Ford Road where it plans to open Thrive Food Hub, helping in the organization’s goals to bring fresh food options to the area while supporting small businesses.

MOST ANTICIPATED INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT/ OPENING: Red Line to North Meck

The 6,148-square-foot, newly renovated space includes a corner store, a commercial kitchen and an open meeting and dining space.

“The retention of commercial properties, recruitment of small businesses, and filling the gap in services and amenities is an important part of our mission,” J’Tanya Adams, founder and executive director of Historic West End Partners, said in a release announcing the acquisition. “This purchase is one of the tools that will empower us to offer the services our community needs, by taking space and activating it.”

Located at 1121 Beatties Ford Road between Tate Street and Booker Avenue, the shopping center’s current tenants include Beatties Ford Corner Mart and Bite Your Tongue Authentic New Orleans Cuisine.

Plans to expand the center include bringing on two resident chefs and a rotating option of pop-up restaurants that will utilize the kitchen space.

After years of negotiations and false starts, the city of Charlotte finally acquired the right-of-way for the Red Line from Norfolk Southern in September.

If everything goes according to plan, we will finally see the Red Line commuter rail travel north to Davidson, Cornelius, and Huntersville (with a starting/ending point in Uptown and stops in Camp North End, Derita, and points nearby).

At this point, it should be clear that we can’t build our way out of traffic with more road lanes, and every new mile of road is a mile that has to be maintained and resurfaced forever at taxpayer expense.

Even though years of delays and an antagonistic General Assembly have given us the Red Line at the expense of the Silver Line to Matthews, it should be reason enough to pass the transit referendum should it appear on the ballot next fall.

INFO@QCNERVE.COM

PHOTO BY GRANT BALDWIN

CITY LIVING

BEST APARTMENT COMPLEX

Winner: Sterling Magnolia Apartments

Runner Up: The Village at Commonwealth

BEST AREA TO LIVE

Winner: Plaza Midwood

Runner Up: East Charlotte

BEST BUILDING

Winner: The Duke Energy Center

Runner Up: One South at The Plaza

BEST CAR RIDE/SHUTTLE SERVICE

Winner: JUMP Transit

Runner Up: Ride Jaunt

BEST CHURCH

Winner: Wedgewood Community Church

Runner Up: Myers Park United Methodist Church

BEST CAT RESCUE

Winner: The Humane Society of Charlotte

Runner Up: Inked Kittens Club

BEST CITY IMPROVEMENT

Winner: Greenways

Runner Up: Light Rail

BEST CITY TOUR

Winner: Funny Bus Comedy City Tour

Runner Up: ArtWalks CLT

BEST CO-WORKING SPACE

Winner: Tabbris Innovation Center

Runner Up: Hygge Coworking

BEST DOG RESCUE

Winner: The Humane Society of Charlotte

Runner Up: Forgotten, Now Family Rescue

BEST FAMILY-FRIENDLY PLACE

Winner: Discovery Place

Runner Up: Camp North End

BEST HOTEL

Winner: Grand Bohemian Hotel

Runner Up: The Dunhill Hotel

BEST LOCAL COLLEGE

Winner: UNC Charlotte

Runner Up: Central Piedmont Community College

BEST LOCAL FARM

Winner: Carrigan Farms

Runner Up: Pascuales’ Farm

BEST NEW CONSTRUCTION PROJECT

Winner: New Main Library

Runner Up: The River District

BEST PARK IN MECKLENBURG COUNTY

Winner: Freedom Park

Runner Up: Reedy Creek Nature Center and Preserve

BEST PLACE FOR A STAYCATION

Winner: JW Marriott Charlotte

Runner Up: The Ritz-Carlton

BEST PLACE TO GET HITCHED

Winner: McGill Rose Garden

Runner Up: The Mint Museum

BEST PLACE TO HOLD AN EVENT

Winner: The Mint Museum

Runner Up: Charlotte Museum of History

BEST PLACE TO PEOPLE-WATCH

Winner: Charlotte Pride Festival & Parade

Runner Up: Optimist Hall

BEST PLACE TO TAKE OUT-OF-TOWN VISITORS

Winner: U.S. National Whitewater Center

Runner Up: Optimist Hall

BEST PLACE TO WORK (BUSINESS)

Winner: Charlotte Museum of History

Runner Up: Queen City News

BEST PLACE TO WORK (REMOTE)

Winner: Local & Qualified

Runner Up: Brighthouse Financial

BEST WAY TO GET AROUND WITHOUT A CAR

Winner: LYNX Light Rail

Runner Up: Pick Me Up Rideshare

SPORTS & LEISURE

BEST BIKE CLUB

Winner: The Spoke Easy

Runner Up: NoDa Social Ride

BEST CAMPING SPOT (IN-STATE)

Winner: Kings Mountain Campground

Runner Up: Hot Springs Resort & Spa

Campground

BEST DISC GOLF COURSE

Winner: Reedy Creek Park Disc Golf Course

Runner Up: Renaissance Disc Golf Park - Gold

BEST LOCAL TEAM FAN BASE

Winner: Charlotte FC

Runner Up: Charlotte Checkers

BEST GOLF COURSE

Winner: Quail Hollow Club

Runner Up: Rocky River Golf Club

BEST HIKING TRAIL

Winner: Crowders Mountain

Runner Up: Grandfather Mountain

BEST LOCAL MASCOT

Winner: Sir Purr - Carolina Panthers

Runner Up: Homer the Dragon - Charlotte Knights

BEST LOCAL SPORTS FIGURE

Winner: Greg Olsen, former Carolina Panther

Runner Up: Muggsy Bogues, former Charlotte Hornet

City Life

READERS’ Picks

BEST LOCAL SPORTS TEAM

Winner: Charlotte FC

Runner Up: Charlotte Checkers

BEST PICKLEBALL COURTS

Winner: Freedom Park

Runner Up: Rally

BEST PLACE TO GET BACK TO NATURE

Winner: U.S. National Whitewater Center

Runner Up: Latta Nature Preserve

BEST MINI GOLF COURSE

Winner: Puttery

Runner Up: Frankie’s Fun Park

BEST REC CENTER

Winner: Eastway Regional Recreation Center

Runner Up: Johnston YMCA

BEST RUN CLUB

Winner: Mad Miles Run Club

Runner Up: NoDa Run Club

BEST TENNIS CLUB

Winner: Charlotte City Tennis

Runner Up: River Run Country Club Racquet & Sports Center

BEST TENNIS COURTS

Winner: Park Road Tennis Center

Runner Up: Dilworth Tennis Group

BEST WEEKEND GETAWAY

Winner: Asheville, NC

Runner Up: Blowing Rock, NC

NEWS & POLITICS & ENTERTAINMENT

BEST FREE EVENT OF 2024

Winner: Wedgewood Film Festival: “Palestine : 100 Years of Struggle” at The Independent Picture House

Runner Up: Charlotte Pride Festival & Parade

BEST HERO

Winner: Jeff Jackson

Runner Up: Jonny Saldana

BEST HEROINE

Winner: Justice Allison Riggs

Runner Up: Sydney Duarte

BEST JOURNALIST

Winner: Joe Bruno

Runner Up: Ryan Pitkin

BEST LOCAL CELEBRITY

Winner: RC Cola

Runner Up: Larry Sprinkle

BEST LOCAL FESTIVAL

Winner: Charlotte Pride Festival & Parade

Runner Up: Yiasou Greek Festival

BEST LOCAL PODCAST

Winner: The Charlotte Unplugged Podcast

Runner Up: Charlotte Talks with Mike Collins

BEST LOCAL MEDIA OUTLET

Winner: Axios Charlotte

Runner Up: WCNC

MOST IMPORTANT NEWS STORY OF THE LAST 12 MONTHS

Winner: Hurricane Helene Coverage

Runner Up: Mark Robinson Coverage

BEST POLITICIAN

Winner: Jeff Jackson

Runner Up: Dimple Ajmera

BEST RADIO PERSONALITY

Winner: (TIED) Miguel Fuller - Miguel & Holly

Winner: (TIED) Mike Collins - WFAE

Runner Up: Mac & Bone - WFNZ

BEST RADIO SHOW

Winner: Miguel & Holly - HITS 96.1

Runner Up: Woody and Wilcox - 106.5 The End

BEST TV PERSONALITY

Winner: Brad Panovich - WCNC

Runner Up: Larry Sprinkle - WCNC

BEST TV SPORTSCASTER

Winner: Ashley Stroehlein - NBC Charlotte

Runner Up: Mike Lacett - Queen City News

BEST TV NEWS STATION

Winner: (TIED) WCNC

Winner: (TIED) Queen City News

Runner Up: WBTV

BEST USE OF LOCAL TAX MONEY

Winner: Public School Funding

Runner Up: Greenways

BEST VIRTUAL EVENT

Winner: Wedgewood Talks - Wedgewood Community Church

Runner Up: Charlotte City Council Meetings

BEST NEWS ANCHOR

Winner: Morgan Fogarty - WCCB

Runner Up: Erica Bryant - WSOC

WHAT WE NEED MORE OF

Winner: Affordable Housing

Runner Up: Public Transit

LOCAL ISSUE THAT NEEDS MORE ATTENTION

Winner: Affordable Housing

Runner Up: Homelessness

SOCIAL MEDIA

BEST FACEBOOK PAGE

Winner: Charlotte Gaymers Network

Runner Up: Queen City News

BEST BUSINESS INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT

Winner: Charlotte Gaymers Network (@charlottegaymersnetwork)

Runner Up: CLT is Creative (@cltiscreative)

BEST INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT

Winner: @charlottegaymersnetwork

Runner Up: @cltguide

BEST INSTAGRAM INFLUENCER

Winner: Andrea Fox (@dailydreclt)

Runner Up: Deej (@Deejandthecats)

BEST LOCAL FACEBOOK GROUP

Winner: Charlotte Gaymers Network

Runner Up: Charlotte Foodies

BEST LOCAL TIKTOK ACCOUNT

Winner: @axioscharlotte

Runner Up: @TheCLTea

BEST TWITTER ACCOUNT

Winner: @cltdevelopment

Runner Up: @ashstro

BEST TWITTER ACCOUNT FOR LOCAL HUMOR

Winner: @woodyandwilcox

Runner Up: @CLTpetpeeves

BEST WEB BLOG

Winner: Carolina Charm

Runner Up: Y’all Weekly

BEST TWITTER ACCOUNT FOR LOCAL NEWS

Winner: @wxbrad

Runner Up: @JoeBrunoWSOC9

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & SOCIAL JUSTICE

BEST LOCAL ACTIVIST

Winner: Braxton Winston

Runner Up: Cameron Pruette

BEST LOCAL ACTIVIST GROUP

Winner: Charlotte Gaymers Network

Runner Up: Charlotte United for Palestine

BEST EVENT FOR A GOOD CAUSE

Winner: Ascend Gala - Time Out Youth

Runner Up: Free Soup Day at Free Range Brewing

BEST NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION

Winner: Time Out Youth

Runner Up: Charlotte Gaymers Network

BEST PLACE TO VOLUNTEER

Winner: Time Out Youth

Runner Up: CMPD Animal Care & Control

BEST SUPPORT GROUP

Winner: Time Out Youth

Runner Up: Charlotte Gaymers Network T4T Program

BURLESQUE PERFORMANCE BY THE FLAMINGO REVUE

FOOD / DRINKS / LOCAL VENDOR MARKET

THE BARREL ROOM AT TRIPLE C BREWING

CRITICS’ PICKS: HALL OF SHAME

We hate to be downers but there are some people walking the streets of Charlotte who made the year shittier for everyone. Do better.

WORST POLITICIAN: Mark Robinson

Since entering the political arena in 2018, when footage of him defending gun rights at a Greensboro City Council in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting went viral, Mark Robinson has remained strident on his path of extremism. Since becoming North Carolina Lieutenant Governor in 2021, the Republican has continuously made hateful, disturbing and misinformed comments publicly, garnering widespread support from his party for doing so, including earning an endorsement from Presidentelect Donald Trump.

Then in September, as he ran for NC governor, things got weird for Robinson when reporting by CNN revealed a new round of disturbing remarks that Robinson apparently made on a website called Nude Africa between the years of 2008-12. In a slew of posts, Robinson called himself a “black NAZI” and voiced his support for the return of slavery, adding “I would certainly buy a few,” CNN reported. Robinson also reportedly admitted to enjoying transgender porn, which contradicts his vehement and often hateful opposition to anything related to the LGBTQ+ community, especially trans rights.

Robinson, for his part, has denied ever making the comments, which include a number of other disturbing claims and revelations including obscenely detailed claims that he slept with his wife’s sister. He later sued CNN for defamation, only to then revise the suit, changing his claim for damages from $50 million to $25,000, the maximum amount one can claim without listing specific damages. Prominent Republican party members ultimately distanced themselves from Robinson and others called on him to drop out of the race. Robinson refused to do so, clearing the way for NC Attorney General Josh Stein’s win. In his concession speech Robinson expressed his feelings regarding the loss.

“I’m disappointed,” he said. “I’m disappointed for you. Because I wanted this for you, and for the people of North Carolina.”

The people of North Carolina do not agree.

WORST GOVERNMENT DEAL: Brooklyn Village

The first time the Brooklyn Village developers came before local government agencies to pitch their plan, Barack Obama was president and Queen

City Nerve did not exist. Even in the beginning, we had concerns; the Brooklyn Village plan would shrink the size of Marshall Park, a well-known gathering place for civic action, and the only large park in Second Ward. Additionally, some members of the development team have a less-than-stellar track record. Now, after a decade of waiting, it’s

clear Mecklenburg County residents got the short end of the stick. The developers bought the land at a premium price and promised affordable housing units — a necessity as Uptown grows. The problem is that those units are nowhere to be found. Nor is anything else.

The latest update on progress — or lack

MARK ROBINSON

PHOTO BY JW HAUGH

Hall of Shame

Critics’ Picks

thereof — came in August, when developers announced that they won’t even be able to start vertical construction on the project until summer 2026 at the earliest. The next time the Brooklyn Village team asks for an extension — and they likely will — both residents and elected officials should meet the request with the highest level of scrutiny.

WORST POTENTIAL THREAT UNDER

TRUMP: Michele Morrow

As bad as it might have been to see Mark Robinson occupy the governor’s mansion — and it would have been bad — the danger posed by another candidate in the slate of Council of State races this November may have been even greater. Fortunately, we won’t have to realize the impacts of either. Among the positive results gained from the 2024 election, Democratic candidate Maurice Green was able to topple his Republican opponent Michele Morrow in the race for NC Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI). The role includes overseeing North Carolina’s public school system, acting as the chief administrative officer of the NC State Board of Education and directing the department’s $11-billion budget, among other duties.

Morrow, much like her pal Robinson, the now lame duck Lieutenant Governor, was a divisive figure at best, an extremist at the least, and potentially deadly to vulnerable children in North Carolina’s public schools at worst. She lobbied hard for the passage of the Parents’ Bill of Rights, a bill that LGBTQ+ organizations have called extremely harmful to trans kids for the reason of overreach. Another troubling aspect of Morrow’s candidacy and popularity in the Republican Party is the fact that she has no experience in public schools, having homeschooled her own children. In fact, she’s called public schools “indoctrination centers” while actively working to undermine public education by supporting a private school voucher program that funnels money away from public schools and into a fund that helps pay to send rich children to private schools.

And we haven’t even gotten to Morrow’s more extremist exploits, such as when she called for the execution of former President Obama, falsely claimed that the “+” in LGBTQ+ stood for “pedophilia,” and was there in DC on Jan. 6, 2021, after which she posted a (since-deleted) video that then-President Donald Trump should have enacted the Insurrection Act and utilized the military to retain power after

he lost the 2020 election. It’s hard to imagine what damage Morrow could have done had she won office, which is why even current superintendent Catherine Truitt, a Republican, refused to endorse her.

“It’s always been a mystery to me why someone who has never trusted her own children with the public school systems, and someone who’s never worked in public schools in any capacity at all, would want to be the state’s leader of our public schools,” Truitt said.

Since being rejected by voters in the Nov. 5 election, Morrow has sought Trump’s appointment as US Secretary of Education, where she’d have even broader powers to tear public education down from its foundations. All we can do is pray that Truitt’s mystery remains one that we never get the answer to.

WORST POLICY FAILURE: Silver Line Elimination

In our City Life section, we discuss the excitement and anticipation around the progress that’s been made toward building the Red Line commuter line to north Mecklenburg County. The other side of the Red Line coin is the apparent loss in transit negotiations of the Silver Line, a light rail track that would run from Uptown through southeast Charlotte to Matthews. It’s the most expensive piece of Charlotte’s transit plan, and with a new, more extreme Trump administration incoming, it was already unlikely to be built in the near future. Elections have consequences.

At this point, we’re still at a speculation phase. Norfolk Southern finally made the tracks available

humiliation as a strategy to pacify detainees. Numerous attempts to urge UNC Charlotte officials to fire Bogdan went unheard over the years, including a petition for termination formed by the “Coalition to Remove John Bogdan.”

Bogdan’s past came up again in May amid the formation of a student-led Gaza solidarity encampment on campus and the university’s controversial response, raiding and breaking down the camp early on the morning of May 6. In the caption of a post about Bogdan’s retirement, the coalition questioned whether his leaving was a victory.

“While one struggle ends, another arises from the same contradiction,” the post said. “The students and faculty of UNC Charlotte continue to be brave and hold strong convictions, as they always have, in the face of a repressive, hostile environment. I can only hope we made Bogdan’s time in North Carolina just a little bit more miserable.”

for the Red Line and the city shifted priorities. The Silver Line was pushed to the back burner, as paying for both would be unfeasible with a new transit plan capping the amount of money that can be spent on rail infrastructure. There are still hopes that the line will run from Uptown to the airport, but the southeastern section is all but dead in the water, with city officials pushing for rapid bus transit to Matthews as a replacement. Elected officials in Matthews aren’t wrong to feel betrayed. A transit route that connects Union County, Matthews, MoRa, Uptown, the airport and Gaston County would be transformative for our region as the suburbs and exurbs continue to grow at a faster rate than the city proper. Not to mention we’re all facing the existential threat of climate change, and electric vehicles aren’t going to solve all of our problems.

DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU: John Bogdan

UNC Charlotte Associate Vice Chancellor for Safety and Security John Bogdan announced he would retire from his position June 30. A controversial figure on campus since his hiring in 2018, the retired US Army colonel’s career at UNC Charlotte was subject to speculation and protest due to his previous work as commander at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. In August 2019, an anonymous flier circulated on UNC Charlotte’s campus accusing Bogdan of overseeing multiple human rights violations during his time at Guantanamo, including torture and religious

MOST HEARTLESS ENFORCEMENT OF SCHOOL POLICY: Cramerton Christian Academy

All Bailey Griggs wanted to do was play music. The up-and-coming musician had already turned down multiple opportunities to graduate early as she transitioned into her senior year of high school. As a homeschooled student participating in Cramerton Christian Academy’s homeschool bridge program, she was determined to live out some aspects of the “normal” teen’s life. The program allowed her to participate in intramurals and she captained the school’s cheerleading team.

She also continued to build on her promising music career, playing gigs wherever she could find them. At 17, it can be tough to find venues willing to host acts so young. She found one in Goldie’s, the South End bar and restaurant that opened in 2023. Once word got around to Cramerton Christian Academy in Gaston County, however, the school told her she could no longer participate in the bridge program, citing a rule that prohibits students from attending “night clubs or bars” or “gatherings with alcohol or drugs present.” She was expelled and made to finish out her senior year at home.

The school never did answer for the selective enforcement of their rule, considering that most students presumably attend restaurants where alcohol is sold on a regular basis. And what about Jesus? Didn’t he turn water to wine? What would he do?

INFO@QCNERVE.COM

MICHELE MORRW

VIA FACEBOOK

CRITICS’ PICKS: IN MEMORIAM

For those we lost along the way.

Dan Wade

Born March 20, 1987

Passed away on Feb. 20, 2024

The Charlotte craft beer community and beyond suffered a loss in Wooden Robot Brewery’s Head Brewer and co-founder Dan Wade, who died in a tragic accident at the brewery.

Wade started as a homebrewer in college at the University of Florida, furthering his education in brewing with a master’s degree at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Wade and fellow co-founder Josh Patton became best friends in middle school, continued on as they became enthusiastic homebrewers, then launched Wooden Robot Brewery together in 2015. Wade became a father for the first time on Jan. 1, 2024. He became a staple in Charlotte’s brewing community, but his impact didn’t end there.

“Dan Wade was more than just a skilled brewer providing beer to the Charlotte Community; he was the backbone of his family, providing love, support, and stability,” read the post on a GoFundMe campaign that followed Wade’s sudden death. “His passion for his craft was evident in every pint

that came from Wooden Robot, and his warm personality left a lasting impact on everyone he encountered. He leaves behind his loving wife, and their beautiful newborn son.”

Mildred Grier

Born May 10, 1923.

Passed away on March 9, 2024, at 100 years old

Mildred Grier was part of the first graduating class at Second Ward High School, Charlotte’s first high school for Black students, and continued to advocate for the preservation of the school’s history throughout her life. She also was among the first women admitted as freshmen to Johnson C. Smith University in 1941 and later received a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York City, where she studied during the summers.

Grier was an active member of First Baptist Church-West, which her formerly enslaved grandparents helped to establish in 1867.

In a 2020 Q&A with QCity Metro, Grier reflected on the advice she would give to young folks.

“I learned that to be loved, you have to be loving, too,” she said. “There are things you have no control

over. You don’t worry about it. Be the best you can be. That’s all that God requires.”

Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey

Born June 10, 1930

Passed away on March 20, 2024, at 93 years old

Born in 1930, Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey graduated from Oconee County Training School and received a Bachelor of Arts from Johnson C. University, a Master of Education from the

University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a doctorate from Union Graduate School in Ohio. She helped integrate Albemarle Road Elementary School after coming on as principal there, one of the first Black women in the area to serve as head administrator at an all-white school.

In 1970, she became the second Black full-time professor at UNC Charlotte, then became the first chair of the Afro-American and African Studies Department there. In 1974, Maxwell-Roddey cofounded Charlotte’s Afro-American Cultural Center,

DAN WADE

PHOTO COURTESY OF WOODEN ROBOT

now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, with fellow professor Mary Harper.

“Dr. Roddey’s legacy lives on through the countless lives she influenced by way of education, community advocacy, and the importance of preserving and celebrating Black history, arts, and culture,” read a statement from the Gantt Center upon Maxwell-Roddey’s passing.

Dr. Maxwell-Roddey started the first Head Start program in Charlotte and co-founded the Theodore and Bertha M. Roddey Foundation. She served on more than 50 boards and commissions and received numerous awards for her dedication, including the Thurgood Marshall Award of Education, Order of the Long Leaf Pine, and Eagle Fly Free Award from the Institute for the Advancement of Multicultural & Minority Medicine.

Willie James Rhynes

Born March 15, 1935

Passed away on April 30, 2024 at 90 years old

Willie James Rhynes, Charlotte entrepreneur and patriarch of the family behind Mr. Charles Chicken & Fish, played an essential role in helping the restaurant, originally established as a convenience store called the Big Apple, become the success it is today. Born in the First Ward neighborhood and raised in the historic Brooklyn neighborhood, Rhynes attended Alexander Street School and the Historic Second Ward High School.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Rhynes owned several businesses in and around the Historic West End,

including restaurants Soul Bowl I & II and Crazy Baby, nightclubs Star Lounge and Mr. Silks, clothing stores, grocery stores, pool halls, a record store, a laundromat, and a shopping center on South Tryon.

“Many family members worked alongside Will … and family knew that as long as he had a business, they had a job,” read Rhynes’ obituary. “As well, the Double Oaks Community was Will’s extended family … the game room was a safe haven for many neighborhood kids, his office was a place where hearts were opened and wisdom and funds were shared, and the grocery store was a place where customers were able to buy groceries within walking distance of their home or on credit, if need be, like the old days.”

Mark ‘MFG’ Baker

Born April 12, 1970

Passed away on May 12, 2024 at 54 years old

Over the last decade or so, Mark Baker, aka Mark from Gastonia, went from a disconnected voice floating over the airwaves on WFNZ to the embodiment of passion, ACC and Charlotte sports fandom, and Southern humor. In his last months, as he battled stomach cancer, he got the chance to see how many lives he had touched during his years calling in to the Mac & Bone Show and sometimes joining the hosts for excursions in his Batmobile. Whether inspiring fellow Panthers fans with his Friday Panthers Pep Talks or simply sharing his hotto-the-point-of-nonsensical takes on all things Southern sports, those who knew him — whether personally or parasocially — will never forget him.

Pat “Big Pat” Doughty

Born March 24, 1969

Passed away on July 24, 2024, at 55 years old

Immediately recognizable by his booming voice, Charlotte Hornets public address announcer Pat “Big Pat” Doughty brought an unmatched energy to the Spectrum Center over 20 seasons with the franchise. Born in Salisbury, Maryland, Doughty went to the University of Maryland - Eastern Shore, where he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2020. He was also a Navy veteran.

“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Pat Doughty,” the Hornets wrote in a statement following his death. “Big Pat’s vibrant voice was the backbone of our game experience and energized Spectrum Center every night. He was dedicated to our team and our fans, even as he fought health issues in recent years. He will be greatly missed by everyone associated with the Hornets organization. Our thoughts are with Pat’s family and his many friends.”

Kelly Alexander Jr.

Born Oct. 17, 1948

Passed away on Sept. 6, 2024 at 75 years old

Charlotte lost multiple champions from the Civil Rights Movement this year, and Kelly Alexander, Jr. remains an icon of that area. A 17-year-old Alexander somehow survived the 1965 bombing of his family’s University Park house on a night when multiple civil rights leaders across Charlotte were targeted, despite the fact that he and his brother were sleeping closest to the blast.

At the time, Alexander’s father was chair of the state NAACP and his uncle Fred, whose house was also bombed a couple doors down, had just been elected as Charlotte’s first Black city council member since the era of the Fusion political party in the 1890s.

In 2007, Alexander would join the North Carolina General Assembly, where he remained an advocate for civil rights while taking up the torch in the fight to legalize marijuana. Sadly, Alexander did not live to see that come to fruition.

Like his father before him, Alexander served as president of the NAACP North Carolina State Conference from 1987-1993.

“Today, we mourn the loss of one of our greatest leaders, NAACP North Carolina Former President Kelly Alexander Jr.,” wrote current NAACP NC President Deborah Dicks Maxwell in a statement following his death.

“His contributions to the civil rights movement in North Carolina and beyond are immeasurable. Kelly Alexander was a champion for justice, a voice for the voiceless, and an unwavering advocate for equality … From his work in the legislature to his leadership within the NAACP, his impact will be felt for generations to come. The entire state of North Carolina has lost a beacon of light, but his legacy will continue to inspire us all to push forward in the fight for justice and equality.”

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DR. BERTHA MAXWELL-RODDEY PHOTO

WILLIE JAMES RHYNES

COURTESY OF RHYNES FAMILY

PAT ‘BIG PAT’ DOUGHTY PHOTO COURTESY OF CHARLOTTE HORNETS/NBA

KELLY ALEXANDER JR. PHOTO BY GRANT BALDWIN

THE BUSINESSES WE LOST ALONG THE WAY

Each year Charlotte loses dozens of businesses that began with a dream. Here, our writers pay homage to just a few.

Blue Blaze Brewing (2016-2024)

The team at Blue Blaze Brewing announced in a February social media post that they would be closing their doors for good the following month. Owner Craig “Unca Keg” Nunn said the company was forced out of its location at the end of the Stewart Creek Greenway in west Charlotte’s Smallwood neighborhood due to rising commercial rent, an issue that has taken its toll on countless small businesses across the city.

In January 2023, a judge granted Blue Blaze Brewing a reprieve that saved it from eviction by its landlord, Atlanta-based firm Portman Holdings, after Portman tried to raise the rent by 376%, but Blue Blaze couldn’t fight the hike forever.

“Over the years, we’ve poured our passion, creativity, and dedication ... our blood, sweat, and tears into crafting exceptional liquids and fostering a vibrant community of beer, music, and outdoors lovers,” Nunn wrote in a farewell statement. “The journey over the last 10 years since I began this idea has been nothing short of extraordinary, exceptional, and life-altering; and we are deeply grateful for the unwavering support and friendship you’ve shown us along the way. We very much wish that our place here could have continued to be available to us into the future.”

Nunn opened Blue Blaze Brewing in 2016 with his father, who passed away two years ago from brain cancer.

“Each and every moment has been testament to the power of good beer, of great company, and of family,” Nunn’s post read. “We take pride in the legacy we’ve created and the indelible mark Blue Blaze has made on the craft beer landscape and in our hearts & lives.”

At the time, Nunn said he hoped the brewery could find a new location, though we haven’t heard any updates since the closure.

littleSpoon (2014-2024)

littleSpoon created lots of buzz when it opened in 2014. With classic ’90s hip-hop bumping during brunch, it was enough to make you forget you were in Myers Park. But it wasn’t just the music that was the draw, as proprietors Alesha Sin Vanata and Kyle Stegemeyer consistently rotated innovative

options on and off the menu at the small farm-tofork space.

“Vanata plans to change the menu ‘on inspiration,’ so diners should know not to get too attached to any of the dishes,” read a Charlotte Magazine review in the year the restaurant opened.

It was this same willingness to create change when the time was right that inspired Vanata, now Alesha Stegemeyer, to call it a day at the quirky brunch spot over the summer.

“It takes a lot of money to keep a restaurant operating. It just got to a point where it wasn’t working anymore,” she told the Charlotte Business Journal in July. “I feel like I accomplished everything I set out to accomplish. It was just time.”

I’ve Read It in Books (2020-2024)

Rob Banker opened I’ve Read It In Books in 2020 as a bookshop inside a record store (Premium Sound) inside a bottle shop (Tip Top Daily Market), where he sold new and used books, growing his collection and building a network of collectors and bibliophiles. When he was forced out of the space in June 2022, he searched for new spaces but couldn’t find anything affordable until he was approached with an opportunity: become one third of the Vintage House, a new trio of retail shops opening in a black house on North Davidson Street directly across from Benny Pennello’s and Heist Brewery. Joining local boutiques Stash Pad Vintage and Milk Money Vintage, Banker opened the new space in March 2023, launching with around 800 books and aiming to double that.

In January 2024, Rob Banker announced via Instagram that he was closing the business, shutting down what had been a promising mission to run a much-needed bookstore inside NoDa.

“I opened just shy of 3-and-a-half years ago and it’s been an incredible journey,” he said in his post. “The new location had much better traffic, but unfortunately it’s not enough to allow me to expand the shop and bring on desperately needed additional staff. At this point, I’m not able to keep up with the demands of the shop and my own health and finances.”

“This was not an easy decision,” he continued. “Thank you to everyone that shopped here over the

last few years and donated books so that we could make a small impact on the community.”

The Government Center Showmars (19992024)

Sure, we don’t usually spill much ink waxing poetic about the closure of a single national chain location, especially one with multiple other locations around Charlotte, but any journalist can tell you that this spot was special. In July, Showmars decided not to renew their lease at the CharlotteMecklenburg Government Center, despite having one of the best deals in Charlotte real estate, with a rent of only $500 per month (cue the exasperated gasps from restaurant owners struggling to pay their rent across the city).

Though it closed at 3 p.m. — hours before most local government meetings — you’d be surprised how much business got done at the Government Center Showmars. It was a great place to run into the visible members of city and county government, as well as the most convenient meeting place for talking to the less visible civil servants who hold the real levers of power. If nothing else, one of their large sweet teas could last through an entire zoning meeting.

Harper’s (1992-2024)

Standing at the intersection of Sharon and Fairview roads, Harper’s was a Charlotte mainstay that saw many a packed lunch service as SouthPark grew from a suburb into another urban core. They closed in July when their lease expired. The site, while not the original, was the best known over the restaurant’s three-decade history. Befitting the pace of progress in Charlotte, it has already been demolished (as has Blue Blaze’s facility above), and in an ironic twist, this site of numerous power meetings between Charlotte bankers will soon be replaced by a commercial bank branch. However, if you’re still missing your Harper’s fix, you can still find them in Greensboro, and a future location in Charlotte has been promised by the ownership group.

BLT Steak (2009-2023)

When the Ritz-Carlton opened in Uptown Charlotte in 2009, it was further affirmation to many that Charlotte was becoming the “worldclass city” it so desperately wanted to be. That its in-house restaurant would be helmed by celebrity chef Laurent Tourondel only further gilded the lily. In a city full of pricy steakhouses, the two most memorable menu items at BLT arguably weren’t

steaks (though those were delicious) but instead the gruyère popovers and lobster Cobb salad. If Charlotte wants to continue to be world-class, another local restaurant needs to step up their popover game in BLT’s absence.

Cold Hearted Gelato (2022-2024)

Sometimes a great concept can have a great location and still not make it. Cold Hearted Gelato, a woman-owned, chef-driven dessert spot in downtown Plaza Midwood, closed its doors in August after two years despite (or perhaps thanks in part to) a complete revamp of Midwood Corners shopping center.

Cold Hearted served up inventive flavors, had great take-home options and served up sweet treats you couldn’t find anywhere else. Sharing a wall with Dunkin, the creative minds at Cold Hearted outperformed their corporate counterparts using more than 31 flavors, and you could always find something new to try. Unfortunately for the Queen City, the restaurant business can be … well, you know.

Futo Buta (2013-2024)

Chef Michael Shortino opened Futo Buta in 2015 as one of the first ramen shops in North Carolina. Shortino tragically passed away in September 2023, leaving those who were close to him rocked. In a Valentine’s Day essay published by Queen City Nerve in February, Shortino’s partner Courtney Estes, who took over operations at Futo Buta, wrote of the heartbreak she was still and will forever experience.

“This story and process is very much ongoing. In these last several months, confronting grief head-on, I confront the complexity of love itself — its ability to transcend boundaries and the confines of mortality,” Estes wrote. “My person is no longer here, but my love for him, and the memories we created throughout Charlotte, still are. If I’m here to remember them, those locations still hold the echoes of our relationship.”

In June of this year, Estes announced that she would close the popular South End eatery, though Shortino’s legacy will live on.

“Just as a death does not diminish the life of a loved one, the closing of a restaurant does not erase the impact it has had on a community,” read her statement on the restaurant’s Instagram page. “Michael’s life was, and is, so greatly intertwined with this concept, one that cultivated an incredible story, marked with truly life-changing relationships.”

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CRITICS’ PICKS: CONSUMER CULTURE

Let the capitalism control you, because what’s your other option?

BEST LOCALLY MADE GIFT: Clayworks

You can buy someone a gift, but it’s always more meaningful when you make it yourself — or better yet, give them the opportunity to make something. You can do any of that at Clayworks. The nonprofit organization has been dedicated to promoting ceramic arts, advancing artists and students, and enriching Charlotte communities for nearly five decades.

Clayworks offers a wide variety of private lessons, one-day workshops, multi-week classes, and youth classes at their 15,000 square-foot facility on Monroe Road in Oakhurst. It’s the perfect gift for someone who’s hard to shop for or seems to already have everything they need.

Depending on the class, participants can learn how to throw on the potter’s wheel and other techniques like handbuilding, sculpture, surface design, and the Japanese glazing technique of Raku firing. In the end, participants get to take home their own handmade piece of pottery, perhaps to give as a gift to someone else. In that way, Clayworks is the gift that keeps on giving.

BEST SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS: Upcycle Arts

Upon Queen City Nerve’s visit to her small shop in the Eastway Crossing shopping center, Upcycle Arts executive director Angela Kollmer pointed out that creative reuse stores like hers — centers that sell upcycled materials and craft supplies — exist two hours away in every cardinal direction from Charlotte, but none in the city itself. None save for Upcycle Arts. Inspired by creative reuse centers like The Scrap Exchange in Durham, Kollmer started hosting Upcycle Arts booths at vendor events in September 2020, having obtained a 501c3 nonprofit status for her new project. She quickly realized that people at such events are mostly looking for finished products rather than shopping for art supplies — she would need to open a brick-and-mortar shop for her niche clientele.

Textile waste from the fast-fashion industry accounts for nearly 10% of global carbon emissions, with 92 million tons of waste produced every year. To counteract the rising financial and environmental cost of fast fashion,

Upcycle Arts prices supplies by weight or at a fraction of the original cost.

“There is a need for us here,” Kollmer said. “It’s nice that we’re able to help people still create and learn to do that and educate our customer base on the sustainable option.”

BEST SUSTAINABILITY-CENTERED EVENT: ArtPop’s Upcycled Fashion Show

Not to be confused with Upcycle Arts, ArtPop’s Upcycled Fashion Show is an entirely different event from an entirely different organization, centered on the same sustainability mission. Launched in 2013, ArtPop has for more than a decade highlighted the work of hundreds

BEST NEW RETAIL: SIMPLY VIBES APOTHECARY

PHOTO BY JAYME JOHNSON

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of artists from Mecklenburg and surrounding counties through its Cities Program, rotating their works on a slew of billboards spread throughout the Charlotte Metro along with other placements. Since 2021, ArtPop founder and executive director Wendy Hickey has led the effort to repurpose retired billboards created by local artists into unique, wearable designs to be showcased in its annual ArtPop Upcycle Fashion Show & Fundraiser.

ArtPop held its fourth annual Upcycled Fashion Show in September at the newly renovated and reopened Sullenberger Aviation Museum, showcasing designs from 13 upcycle artists. The fashion show and ArtPop’s Upcycling Initiatives have prevented more than 13,000 square feet of vinyl from going into landfills each year.

“Charlotte loves new and shiny. At some point, somebody will want something different … [but] as long as the community wants this, you betcha we’ll keep doing it,” Hickey told Queen City Nerve in the lead-up to this year’s show. “If you pull back the curtain at ArtPop, we’re the tiniest little organization but doing mighty, mighty, mighty stuff.”

BEST FASHION RETAIL: Juicy Body Goddess

Juicy Body Goddess, a plus-size-only boutique located in Northlake Mall, went viral on TikTok in 2021 for featuring prom dresses that transformed the young women wearing them into stunning goddesses. The store has a reputation for offering both affordable and flattering clothes for plus sized women.

“This is my purpose, this is where I’m supposed to be,” the owner, Summer Lucille, said in an interview with WCNC. “We started off years ago in the back of a trunk.”

The boutique has been featured nationally for its attention given to plus-sized women, a demographic that is often ignored or given meager choices. In September 2023, Lucille was forced to relocate for all the right reasons; her small space couldn’t properly serve the amount of customers who were coming to see her, sometimes from as far as Kansas City, Missouri.

In fact, on the day she re-opened, Fulton County commissioner Khadijah Abdur-Rahman from Atlanta drove up just to be there, proclaiming Sept. 16 as Summer Lucille Day (we’re not sure if the proclamation affects Mecklenburg County or Fulton County, but we’ll honor it).

This year, she made headlines again when she spoke out against the proposed TikTok ban, pointing to the success the platform has brought her as a small-business owner.

BEST FASHION DESIGNER: Dawn Kelly

Dawn Kelly is CEO and head designer of The Valley, a streetwear brand based in Charlotte and named for the Hidden Valley neighborhood where Kelly grew up. Through her work in fashion, Kelly aims to highlight the connections between herself and her ancestors,

addressing tough social issues and creating necessary dialogue. An alumna of SouthEnd ARTS’ Project P.A.I.R. mentorship program, in October Kelly debuted her Homecoming collection at Myers Park UMC. The collection explores the intricate balance between the freedoms and constraints experienced by Black individuals in America.

“Through bold silhouettes and textured fabrics, it reflects the duality of empowerment and entrapment, highlighting the resilience and complexity of identity within the framework of opportunity,” read the description. “Each piece serves as a statement on the beauty and struggle inherent in the journey toward true liberation.”

BEST NEW RETAIL: Simply Vibes Apothecary

On North Davidson Street in NoDa there’s a Black woman-owned metaphysical supply store that serves as a welcoming space for free spirits, curious souls and

earthy adventurers. To put it simply: at Simply Vibes Apothecary, the vibes are just vibing. Owner Destinee Sanderson opened the shop earlier this year in a storefront in the Renaissance Townhomes, across the street from Divine Barrel Brewing and Deejai Noodle Bar. She carries a thoughtfully curated selection of spiritual and wellness products, including candles, crystals, tea, health tinctures, cleansing tools, bohemian jewelry and whimsical clothing.

Simply Vibes Apothecary was born from Sanderson’s desire to help others connect to their unique spiritual paths and to foster a community centered on wellness, connection and support. Sanderson was raised in a spiritually nurturing household, but it was only after experiencing a spiritual attack that she delved into her innate powers, awakening as a healer, empath and conjure woman. Now, Sanderson brings her craft to the world, offering individuals the opportunity to heal themselves and discover their own inner power through Simply Vibes Apothecary.

BEST STREETWEAR: FarReach Vintage

This vintage store located on West Morehead Street in Third Ward offers a range of streetwear-style clothing from the 1950s to the early 2000s (feel old?), plus military and workwear. They also buy and trade clothing. South Meck High School grad Carter Seate opened the brickand-mortar store at 19 years old with Christian Thropp in November 2022. Since then, their online following has exploded to over 14,000 on Instagram, and their shop has found success — not just with typical shoppers but also bands in town for shows, plus professional athletes. The location right outside the Bank of America Stadium makes FarReach a great spot to stop into on game days for Panthers gear. Keep your eyes on their social media for sales.

BEST CONSIGNMENT SHOP: Thrift Pony

Thrift Pony is hands-down changing the thrifting game in Charlotte. It’s pink and flirty and fun and actually has both eclectic vintage dresses and modern trendy pieces at affordable prices (usually $25 and under). Unlike a typical thrift situation, the actual shopping and sifting isn’t a drag. It’s well-organized by size and clothing type and the whole shopping experience is elevated by Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift on the aux, splashes of color and bottle-cap studded mirrors.

If you’re a seller, Thrift Pony takes walk-ins and consignment appointments. If you’re a buyer, you’ll find that the selection at Thrift Pony changes regularly. The pop-up markets that Thrift Pony hosts involve local vendors, from tarot readers and jewelry makers to other vintage sellers and tattoo artists. In June, owner Hellen Moffitt announced her move from the original Commonwealth building to a bigger 2,700-square-foot space in Camp North End, where she’s able to hold 3,000 items for customers to peruse with hundreds of pieces added daily. It’s enough to let a whole day get away from you.

BEST GIFT SHOP: CLTCH

Do you or a loved one need a lightning bolt necklace? A fuzzy Kangol hat? A Dolly Parton votive candle? A book on tarot? Something that seems vaguely like you are supposed to smoke weed out of it? Then CLTCH is the place to be. A tiny kingdom of glamor and gift-wrapping, with just enough scuzz and vague unwholesomeness to remind you that this ain’t South End, the shop is a muststop when a birthday, bar mitzvah or Leap Day is looming. Don’t be intimidated by the sexy cartoon wolf behind the counter. That’s Scott Weaver, local design maven and rock star, and the guy who you buy stuff from at CLTCH.

A fixture in the Plaza Midwood neighborhood with his finger in a whole bevy of pies, Weaver’s curation is spot on and he’s more than willing to help you pick out that perfect piece.

PHOTO BY JAYME JOHNSON

BEST CONSIGNMENT SHOP: THRIFT PONY

PHOTO BY JAYME JOHNSON

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BEST EVOLUTION: VisArt Video

In a world where neither John Waters nor David Lynch can get projects made and Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon doesn’t have a physical release, all because streaming platforms are run by soulless fuckheads who think life is some sort of casino in which the winner is the one with the most chips, it is easy to get discouraged. It’s easy to let yourself stew in the thought that nothing lasts and that goodness has passed from the face of the Earth. But then there is VisArt Video.

The movie rental spot had already established itself as a bastion of culture decades ago when it was a mere video store. But in recent years it’s transformed into a nonprofit organization that maintains one of the largest video archives in the country, and is fast becoming a vital community space on Charlotte’s east side, hosting screenings, concerts, readings, theatrical productions and just about anything else you can imagine, all while continuing to rent videos and sell Funko Pops. All Hail VisArt!

BEST POP-UP: VTGCLT Pop

Half of the battle in the pop-up scene is being in the right place at the right time, and VTG Charlotte has that formula 100% dialed in. Popping up not just for the day or weekend but throughout the holiday season, their annual holiday market VTGCLT Pop is the answer to gift paralysis for everyone on your list with a seemingly effortless mix of retro holiday nostalgia, useful trinkets and locally made products. Whether it’s for your toddler niece, your grumpy coworker or your discerning bestie — there’s truly something for everyone at VTGCLT Pop. While we don’t usually share business hours in our Best in the Nest entries, since we release right as holiday shopping is getting into full swing, you can catch them weekends from 10 a.m.-7 p.m. at Camp North End until Dec. 5, then daily 10-7 until Dec. 23.

BEST SPORTING STORE: Rare and Retro Soccer

Charlotte is fast becoming a soccer city with Charlotte FC, Charlotte Independence and the new professional women’s team, Carolina Ascent FC, all playing in town, so it makes sense we would have a soccer jersey trading store. At Rare and Retro Soccer, located in Providence Plaza on the corner of Providence and South Sharon Amity roads in south Charlotte, soccer fans can buy, sell and trade new and used classic, retro and limited jerseys. They also have other apparel and accessories.

Rare and Retro Soccer was founded in 2021 by Eddie Powell, who has had a lifelong passion for soccer, both on and off the pitch. After playing Division I college soccer, he went on to own a Soccer Shots franchise and helped manage and grow the US adidas soccer brand. Although he enjoyed many areas of the soccer business,

Powell loved the apparel side, which was serendipitous considering the rise of “kit culture” in Charlotte and across the country as of late. Powell started Rare and Retro Soccer to share his love of retro, classic and vintage jerseys with supporters of all kinds. He now operates two stores, including one in Atlanta.

BEST REOPENING: Armada Skate Shop

Armada Skate Shop is gearing up for a rebranding to Parts & Service with a move to Camp North End before the end of the year and the Charlotte skate community can’t wait. It’s the third move for the shop, which first opened in Plaza Midwood in 2010, then moved to Eastway Crossing in 2019. That location has been closed since February.

Owner and Charlotte native Patrick Carroll plans to reopen Armada as Parts & Service in the Keswick section of Camp North End with a new storefront next to Hardy Boys Records. It will offer a wide range of hardware and soft goods including skateboards, longboards, roller skates, shoes, clothing and accessories.

The new shop will have an automotive theme and include a professional repair station equipped with a service station-inspired tool kit. It will also host boardpainting workshops led by local artists and workshops for kids.

“Camp North End is filled with this amazing creative energy and fosters connection,” Carroll said while announcing the move. “It’s the perfect place to launch something ambitious where everyone, even kids and families, can experience the magic of skateboarding and the way it brings people together.”

BEST WAY TO FREE YOURSELF: House of Purge

We all have a little rage inside us caused by pent-up tension, anger and frustration that builds in our everyday lives. Here’s a reminder: That rage needs to come out sometimes, and it’s best if it’s brought out in a healthy way. At House of Purge in north Charlotte, visitors are free to smash, bash and destroy the hell out of inanimate objects in their specially designed rage room — providing space to vent in ways that would create trouble in the outside world.

Whether you go as a group or solo, each session is 30 minutes and provides the chance to smash various glass items, a medium-sized item (such as TV, guitar, printer), and a car. You can also BYOS (Bring Your Own Shit) to destroy. House of Purge is not a medically therapeutic clinic, but visitors find that they leave calmer, happier and more at peace — ready to rejoin button-down society and remain polite and civilized in all circumstances. Namaste.

BEST YOGA SPACE: The Coterie

The Coterie teaches more than just postures. Located in Wesley Heights, the wellness studio is committed to the practice of self study — acknowledging and pushing against our own bias and facing our own privilege head

Midwood Barbers

Best Barber Shop

BEST STREETWEAR: FARREACH VINTAGE

PHOTO BY JAYME JOHNSON

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on. In the space, calming the chatter in your mind and tapping into your breath are equally as important as strengthening the physical body. The business offers three types of movement-based classes that allow students to get more in touch with themselves: Peace, Prana, and Power.

Peace is a Yin Yoga practice in slowing down. Students hold poses for at least three to five minutes at a time, giving the mind time to exist without expectation. Prana, a Vinyasa practice, is all about breath. Students move in tandem with their breath and learn to harness it as a tool and a compass for personal practice. Power is all about strength, both physically and mentally. Students perform a combination of yoga postures alongside traditional HIIT elements like jumping jacks, squats and pushups, with the option of using weights.

BEST BOOKSTORE: Book Buyers

Run by father-daughter duo Richard and Lee Rathers for the last quarter-century, Book Buyers is among the last of the proper used bookshops in Charlotte, celebrating its 25-year anniversary in business this year. The shop opened its doors in Plaza Midwood at the corner of The Plaza and Central Avenue in August 1999 and quickly found that the neighborhood was hungry

for a bookshop. Over the next 20 years, the Rathers duo became foundational to the neighborhood, a resource for bibliophiles and cat lovers alike. The shop’s cats are wellknown and beloved. Currently there are three: Junior, Inky and Deena.

Toward the end of 2021, the Book Buyers team announced that they wouldn’t be able to stay in their Plaza Midwood home. They relocated to Eastway Crossing in February 2022, where they’ve been serving the community since. In a city where the tension between organic culture and corporate simulacra is palpable, it’s no overstatement to declare that Charlotte needs Book Buyers.

BEST CBD STORE: KANNA CBD

KANNA CBD is a family- and women-owned indoor hydroponic hemp grow store that sells CBD hemp flower, edibles, cannabis-infused mocktails, vapes and cannabisinspired accessories.

The shop sends all flower to third-party testing sites to get a Certificate of Analysis before it sells in-store, where they offer discount codes for every day of the week including an everyday deal to buy three CBD or Mystery Mini pre-rolls and get one free. The products sell in any amount between a single gram and 28 grams. KANNA’s two locations in South End and University both have an outdoor patio to sit and enjoy its products safely.

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READERS’ Picks

RETAIL

BEST ADULT TOY STORE

Winner: White Rabbit

Runner Up: Adam & Eve

BEST BICYCLE SHOP

Winner: The Spoke Easy

Runner Up: Charlotte Re-Cyclery

BEST BOOKSTORE

Winner: Park Road Books

Runner Up: Trope Bookshop

BEST CBD SHOP

Winner: The Happy Camper

Runner Up: Crowntown Cannabis

BEST CLOTHING STORE

Winner: Thrift Pony

Runner Up: Boris & Natasha

BEST CONSIGNMENT SHOP

Winner: Sleepy Poet Antique Mall

Runner Up: Thrift Pony

BEST CUSTOMER LOYALTY PROGRAM

Winner: Summit Coffee

Runner Up: Two Scoops

BEST FARMERS MARKET

Winner: Charlotte Regional Farmers Market

Runner Up: Kings Drive Farmers Market

BEST FLEA MARKET (WITHIN AN HOUR)

Winner: Sleepy Poet Antique Mall

Runner Up: Webb Road Flea Market

BEST FLORAL SHOP

Winner: Bloom & Bottle

Runner Up: Midwood Flower Shop

BEST FORMAL WEAR STORE

Winner: New York Bride & Groom

Runner Up: McKenzie Jade’s BEST FURNITURE STORE

Winner: Sleepy Poet Antique Mall

Runner Up: Habitat for Humanity ReStore

BEST GIFT SHOP

Winner: Paper Skyscraper

Runner Up: Moxie Mercantile

BEST GOLF SHOP

Winner: Leatherman Golf Learning Center

Runner Up: PXG Charlotte

BEST HEAD SHOP

Winner: Infinity’s End

Runner Up: The Happy Camper

BEST HOME ACCESSORIES STORE

Winner: Sleepy Poet Antique Mall

Runner Up: Grow

BEST IN-STORE PET

Winner: Junior at Book Buyers

Runner Up: Winnie at Good Postage

BEST JEWELRY STORE

Winner: The Golden Carrot

Runner Up: Queen City’s Custom Jewelers

BEST LOCAL PRODUCT

Winner: 704 Shop

Runner Up: Delgado’s Fuego Hot Sauce

BEST MUSIC EQUIPMENT STORE

Winner: Midwood Guitar Studio

Runner Up: Music & Arts

BEST NEW BUSINESS CONCEPT

Winner: Seemingly Overzealous Ice Cream

Runner Up: Upcycle Arts

BEST NEW STORE (LAST 2 YEARS)

Winner: Thrift Pony

Runner Up: Hardy Boys Records and Comics

BEST ONLINE-ONLY STORE

Winner: Honeybear Bake Shop

Runner Up: Disco Dolphin

BEST OUTDOOR & SPORTING GOODS STORE

Winner: Gear Goat Xchg

Runner Up: Great Outdoor Provision Co.

BEST PET STORE

Winner: Pet Supplies Plus

Runner Up: Cold Blooded & Bizarre

BEST PLACE TO BUY VINTAGE

Winner: Sleepy Poet Antique Mall

Runner Up: Thrift Pony

BEST PLANT SHOP

Winner: PlantHouse

Runner Up: Grow

BEST POP-UP MARKET

Winner: Front Porch Sundays

Runner Up: Vintage Charlotte (VTGCLT)

BEST RECORD STORE

Winner: Lunchbox Records

Runner Up: Hardy Boys Record and Comics

BEST SHOE STORE

Winner: Charlotte Running Company

Runner Up: Boris & Natasha

BEST THRIFT STORE

Winner: Thrift Pony

Runner Up: Sleepy Poet Antique Mall

BEST VAPE SHOP

Winner: The Happy Camper

Runner Up: Infinity’s End

DESIGN & STYLE & MODIFICATION

BEST BARBERSHOP

Winner: Midwood Barbers

Runner Up: No Grease! Barbershop

BEST FASHION DESIGNER

Winner: Will White

Runner Up: Jade Sky

BEST HAIR SALON

Winner: Bohemian Stylehouse

Runner Up: eXplicit Salon

BEST

HAIR STYLIST

Winner: Kelsey Mitchell - Bohemian Stylehouse

Runner Up: Ashley Taylor - Hyperfang Studios

BEST INTERIOR DESIGNER

Winner: Melissa Herriott

Runner Up: (TIED) Natalie Papier

Runner Up: (TIED) Scott Weaver

BEST LASH ARTIST

Winner: Taylor Kaminsky

Runner Up: Isabella Fino Bard

BEST MAKEUP ARTIST

Winner: Makeup by Caitlyn Michelle

Runner Up: Elizabeth Tolley

BEST NAIL SALON

Winner: Delaney Veurink - eXplicit Salon

Runner Up: Modish Nail Spa

BEST TATTOO SHOP

Winner: Ruby Tiger Tattoo

Runner Up: Made To Last Tattoo

BEST PIERCING STUDIO

Winner: SADU Body Piercing & Modifications

Runner Up: Made To Last Tattoo - Michael Wilson

HEALTH & WELLNESS

BEST CHIROPRACTOR

Winner: Charlotte Chiropractic Center

Runner Up: (TIED) Loving Wellness Chiropractic

Runner Up: (TIED) Klaus Sports Chiropractic & Performance

BEST DENTIST

Winner: Plaza Midwood Dentistry

Runner Up: Lineberger Dentistry

BEST DOCTOR

Winner: Allen Joseph Shepard, DO - Atrium

Health Primary Care One Health Family

Medicine & Urgent Care

Runner Up: Alyson Leigh Shogan, MDPerspective Health & Wellness

BEST ESTHETICIAN

Winner: Skin by Danielle Rose

Runner Up: Elizabeth Lasswell - Pure Glo Spa

BEST FITNESS STUDIO

Winner: Inner Peaks

Runner Up: Bloom Movement Artistry

BEST GROUP WORKOUT

Winner: (TIED) Burn Boot Camp

Winner: (TIED) Mad Miles Run Club

Runner Up: Bloom Movement Artistry

BEST MASSAGE THERAPIST

Winner: Joseph East - Veridical Therapies

Runner Up: Ashley Masters Healing Arts

BEST PERSONAL TRAINER

Winner: Sarah Hahn

Runner Up: Fit Method CLT

BEST SPA

Winner: Mood House

Runner Up: The Ritz-Carlton Spa

BEST TENNIS COACH

Winner: Charlotte Tennis Academy

Runner Up: Aaron Mullennix - Charlotte City Tennis

BEST THERAPIST OR COUNSELOR

Winner: Bright View Counseling

Runner Up: Steffie Beard, MA LCMHC

BEST URGENT CARE FACILITY

Winner: Novant Health-GoHealth Urgent Care

Runner Up: OneSpotMD Primary and Urgent Care

BEST VETERINARIAN

Winner: Queen City Animal Hospital

Runner Up: Monroe Road Animal Hospital

BEST YOGA STUDIO

Winner: Okra Charlotte

Runner Up: Khali Yoga Center

BEST YOGA INSTRUCTOR

Winner: Caitlyn Sheff

Runner Up: Grace Millsap

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES & REPAIR

BEST ADVERTISING AGENCY

Winner: Tattoo Projects

Runner Up: well-run media + marketing

BEST ATTORNEY

Winner: Amanda B. Cannavo - Dozier Miller

Law Group

Runner Up: Timothy J. Pavone - The Law Offices of Attorney Timothy J. Pavone

BEST AUTO DEALER

Winner: Williams Subaru

Runner Up: Hendrick Lexus Charlotte

BEST CAR MECHANIC

Winner: Woodie’s Auto Service & Repair Centers

Runner Up: Nick’s Auto Repair

BEST CLOTHING ALTERATIONS

Winner: Anna’s Alterations

Runner Up: Christie’s Alterations

BEST DOGGIE DAYCARE

Winner: Skiptown

Runner Up: Midwood Barkery

BEST DRY CLEANERS

Winner: Star Cleaners & Laundry

Runner Up: American Dry Cleaners

BEST ELECTRICAL SERVICE

Winner: Dilling Heating, Cooling, Plumbing & Electrical

Runner Up: No Shorts Electric

BEST EVENT PLANNER(S)

Winner: J. Leigh Events

Runner Up: Third Rock Events

BEST GENERAL CONTRACTOR

Winner: Springdale Custom Builders

Runner Up: Choate Construction

Consumer Culture

READERS’ Picks

BEST HEATING & AIR COMPANY

Winner: Morris-Jenkins

Runner Up: Travis Crawford Heating Cooling & Plumbing

BEST HOME/OFFICE CLEANING SERVICE

Winner: M&MCleaning Services

Runner Up: My Clean 4 You

BEST INSURANCE AGENCY

Winner: (TIED) CAP Insurance Group

Winner: (TIED) Community One Insurance

BEST INSURANCE AGENT

Winner: Rachel Klauber - CAP Insurance Group

Runner Up: Jana Fowler - Community One Insurance

BEST LANDSCAPING & LAWN CARE

Winner: Crown Town Landscapes

Runner Up: Upcycled Landscape Design and Consulting

BEST LAW FIRM

Winner: Cavanaugh Hamrick McCarthy, PLLC

Runner Up: The Law Offices of Attorney Timothy J. Pavone, PLLC

BEST MARKETING COMPANY

Winner: Black Wednesday

Runner Up: Yellow Duck Marketing

BEST MEMBERSHIP/SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE

Winner: Mood House

Runner Up: (TIED) Blind Date with a Book from That’s Novel Books

Runner Up: (TIED) Crown Town Compost

BEST MOVING & STORAGE COMPANY

Winner: Gentle Giant Moving Company

Runner Up: Two Men and a Truck

BEST PARTY & EVENT RENTAL

Winner: Starlight on 22nd

Runner Up: Charlotte Museum of History

BEST PEST CONTROL

Winner: Black Pest Prevention

Runner Up: Orkin

BEST PET GROOMING

Winner: The Dog Salon

Runner Up: Skiptown

BEST PLUMBING SERVICE

Winner: Bliss Plumbing

Runner Up: Superior Plumbing and Drains

BEST POOL CLEANING & SERVICES

Winner: Carolina Pool King

Runner Up: Hofmann Pools

BEST PR COMPANY

Winner: Black Wednesday

Runner Up: (TIED) Rachel Sutherland

Communications

Runner Up: (TIED) Yellow Duck Marketing

BEST REAL ESTATE AGENCY

Winner: Savvy + Co. Real Estate

Runner Up: Patel Standard Realty

BEST REAL ESTATE AGENT

Winner: Lara Bucci - Savvy + Co. Real Estate

Runner Up: Kara West - eXp Realty

BEST TRAVEL AGENCY

Winner: The Constant Wayfarer

Runner Up: Travel Now with April - Dream Vacations

BEST TAX PREP & ACCOUNTING SERVICES

Winner: (TIED) Foard and Company, PA

Winner: (TIED) Momentum Tax & Accounting

Runner Up: (TIED) D.Rowe Co.

Runner Up: (TIED) Evaluate Tax Consulting Group

UPCOMING EVENTS IN THE QUEEN CITY

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CAMPFIRE TALES: TURKEY TIME

Looking forward to Thanksgiving but not quite ready to let go of the Halloween spirit? Phoenix Down RPG keeps things spooky year-round with their monthly Campfire Tales events, which mix scary stories with live music and tabletop games. Instead of rolling dice, watch players draw blocks from the giant Tumbling Blocks Tower to determine their fate. The story is scored by live musical accompaniment interacting with the story and character choices — oh, and the crowd gets their chance to control the story, too. Enjoy a delightful story, support local creatives, pick up some merch, check out the portable mural, and take part in the official camp sing-along song while enjoying bevs from Free Range.

More: $10-$35; Nov. 20, 6:30-8:30 p.m.; Free Range Brewing, 2320 N. Davidson St.; tinyurl.com/ CampfireTalesTurkey

ongoing THURS THURS

96.9 THE KAT’S RISING STARS

Charlotte’s local country station teams up with Charlotte’s premier country music venue to host the annual Rising Stars concert, featuring a slate of acts that you’ll want to tell your kids one day, “I saw them back when…” This year’s lineup includes Parkland, Florida’s Ashley Cooke, who’s already garnered 200 million streams; Dylan Marlowe from Georgia, whose debut studio album Mid-Twenties Crisis dropped in September; and Tennessee-born troubadour Larry Fleet, who is a labelmate to Cooke on Big Loud Records and is looking to breakout after penning hit songs for some of country’s biggest names.

More: $25; Nov. 21, 8:30 p.m.; Coyote Joe’s, 4621 Wilkinson Blvd.; coyote-joes.com

‘SOME LIKE IT HOT’

Set in Chicago when Prohibition has everyone thirsty for a little excitement, Some Like It Hot is the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit. With gangsters hot on their heels, they catch a cross-country train for the life-chasing, life-changing trip of a lifetime. With a combination of heart and laughs, song and dance, Some Like It Hot won more theatre awards than any show in its season, likely for the same reasons Deadline called it “a tap-dancing, razzle-dazzling embrace of everything you love about musical theatre.”

More: $30 and up; Nov. 26-Dec. 1, times vary; Belk Theater, 130 N. Tryon St.; blumenthalarts.org

EAT, GAY, LOVE

JUVENILE

There aren’t many opening notes in musical history that can immediately inspire as much feeling as the violin chords that kick off Juvenile’s 1998 smash hit “Back That Azz Up,” which introduced bounce music to the mainstream and helped bring Cash Money Records to the forefront of hip-hop music. While that may be the greatest of his greatest hits, Juve has plenty more, from “HA” to “Slow Motion,” he kept the radio waves hot well through the turn of the century. Perhaps inspired by his 2023 Tiny Desk Concert, the New Orleans legend is performing with a live band during his current tour.

More: $118.50; Nov. 22, 8 p.m.; The Fillmore, 820 Hamilton St.; fillmorenc.com

ALI SIDDIQ

Now a stand-up comedian and public speaker out of Houston, Texas, Ali Siddiq’s unique style of standup began behind the walls of incarceration, an experience that serves as an incubator for interesting experiences and good stories. New York Times critic Jason Zinoman compared Siddiq’s special The Domino Effect to an episode of HBO’s legendary crime drama The Wire. “Great personal storytelling relies on pacing and structure, but there’s also something to be said for living an interesting life. Siddiq has, yet he also never loses sight of the goal of getting laughs,” Zinoman writes. “This is nervy humor, violence always looming. In stand-up, you wait for the punchline. Here, it’s the punch.”

More: $30 and up; Nov. 23, 8 p.m.; Ovens Auditorium, 2700 E. Independence Blvd.; boplex.com

IT TAKES A VILLAGE: A TINY CONCERT FOR A MAJOR CAUSE

It took Charlotte-based Dreamville rapper Lute many years into his successful career before he finally headlined a show in his hometown back in August, but he’s back just a few months later, answering the call for help from fellow North Carolinians. All benefits from this show will go to Project Hope, which continues to provide critical assistance on the ground to communities recovering from the destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene. And Lute’s not alone; he’s joined by an impressive lineup of Charlotte’s best including Tracei, Dexter Jordan, Makeda, VVG, and DJ FLLS.

More: $15; Nov. 29, 10 p.m.; Snug Harbor, 1228 Gordon St.; snugrock.com

Queen City Nerve and Brian DuBois host the sixth annual inclusive Thanksgiving dinner, keeping the same mission that drove the first one: spreading love and food to underserved members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Unfortunately, members of the LGBTQIA+ community are often excluded from family functions during the holidays and we work together to offer a safe space for enjoyment. This free Thanksgiving dinner is for anyone in search of community care. Once again, we are partnering with Block Love CLT, a local nonprofit that serves our homeless neighbors, to ensure that no leftovers go to waste (save for the ones on the plates).

More: Free; Nov. 28, 2-5 p.m.; Resident Culture - South End, 332 W. Bland St.; tinyurl.com/ EatGayLove24

11/21 11/20 11/23 11/26 - 12/1 11/28 11/22

HEY RICHARD W/ THE OBSIDIAN FEMMES

Fronted by We Rock Charlotte co-founder Krystle Baller, the all-female, queer-friendly group Hey RICHARD plays blistering hard-rock songs that touch on equality and women’s issues, among other topics. They’re joined by Obsidian Femmes, another all-female rock group that’s coming off a performance at We Rock’s 10-year anniversary Rock the Block party, where they debuted new single “LA Summer.” This time they’ll be across the street at Starlight, where just like Rock the Block, the show will be chock-full of badass women playing kickass music.

More: Free; Nov. 30, 8:30 p.m.; Starlight on 22nd, 422 E. 22nd St.; starlighton22nd.com

UPCOMING EVENTS IN THE QUEEN CITY

thurs 12/5

KACEY MUSGRAVES

Seven-time Grammy Award-winning singer/ songwriter Kacey Musgraves announced her longawaited return to the stage with the Deeper Well World Tour. When she reaches Charlotte she’ll be coming off a performance at the 58th annual CMA Awards, where she’ll perform her single “Architect.” She’s up for Album of the Year for Deeper Well plus Female Vocalist of the Year, but because the awards take place on the day this paper hit racks, we’re not sure just how things turned out. Regardless of what sort of hardware she takes home, she remains one of the guiding progressive voices in country music.

More: $70 and up; Dec. 5, 7:30 p.m.; Spectrum Center, 333 E. Trade St.; spectrumcentercharlotte.com

2024 BEST IN THE NEST PARTY

12/7

Join us in celebrating all of our 2024 Best in the Nest winners and our six-year anniversary as Queen City Nerve with an evening full of live music, live art, specialty drinks, amazing food and plenty of other great experiences. Our lineup includes Album of the Year winner Nia J as well as The Flamingo Revue, winners of Best Performing Arts Organization. They’ll be joined by Best Pop winner Lynsea, pophip-hop artist and Concord native MoonLander, and celebrated Charlotte indie rockers Junior Astronomers. We promise it will be the coolest sixth birthday you’ve ever been to.

More: $20-$30; Dec. 7, 6-10:30 p.m.; The Barrel Room at Triple C Brewing, 2832 Griffith St.; tinyurl.com/QCNERVEBIN2024

CRITICS’ PICKS: FOOD & DRINK

For the folks who produce the fuel on which our city runs.

BEST RESTAURANT: L’Ostrica

Last year, we named L’Ostrica the Best New Restaurant and, in a fortuitous turn of events, it is simply the Best Restaurant in Charlotte this year. What is so refreshing about the dynamic duo of owners Cat Carter and Eric Ferguson and L’Ostrica as a whole is how they’ve shaken up the execution of highbrow tasting menus. They’ve really stripped down any garish components of white-tablecloth dining, and instead, embraced a space that is approachable — full of cookbooks and personally significant art — and service that is simple, warm and consistent.

The tasting menu dishes, ranging from 5 to 10 courses, ooze with elegance and come from the sleek open kitchen where the rhythmic coordination of slicing, setting and garnishing plates is in clear view.

The menu presents no explicit thematic

throughline other than remaining blatantly loyal to sustainable farms in the area. Guests often don’t know what to expect when they enter and won’t receive a menu until the end of the service; they are led by the server’s introduction and then encouraged to trust their own palate. Is that bacon in the smoked tomato? Warm brioche in the sparkling rose? Bright ginger in a fried oyster?

Maybe the best part about it is its (relative) approachability. The themed Sunday Suppers are feel-good community dinners. The mini-market with online “chef tips” and the rotating lunch special are more wallet-friendly than the tasting menu and, at the end of the day, carve meaningful avenues to connect with curious Charlotte diners.

BEST NEW RESTAURANT: Albertine

Albertine is the upscale jewel we’ve been waiting for in Uptown Charlotte. Exquisite, grand,

BEST RESTAURANT: L’OSTRICA

PHOTO BY RICO MARCELO

Food & Drink

Readers’ Picks

confident, feminine, a whole feast for the eyes. You can make a meal just out of a glass of wine and a few meze dips, but you won’t want to do the bare minimum because there is nothing bare minimum about Albertine. The food comes out on silver platters, each table has a slightly different marble seal or curved shape, wine is poured tableside, servers sport these striking cobalt blue coats. Each detail — from the menu to the bathrooms to the archways — is a jaw-dropping affair.

Touted as a Mediterranean restaurant leading up to the opening, you’ll find that Chef Joe Kindred designed a menu that also pays homage to Southern cuisine, or at least Southern ingredients like SC quail and wahoo or NC okra and flounder. The crispy charred malawach and the gamebird cappelletti demonstrate a global flair that is also clear in the sweeping wine list. This was a genuinely needed addition to Uptown; it’s a fancy fit for theatergoers, business folk, double daters, sports-watchers and convention attendees. Or really anyone who is willing to have a meal they haven’t had before in the Queen City.

BEST NEW CASUAL EATERY: Joan’s Bakery & Deli

Joan’s is part deli, part bakery, and every part delicious. It opened at the Metropolitan in Midtown at the end of 2023 and has been an instant hit, making fans question what life was like before Joan’s. Meshugganah is the Jewish deli concept inside Joan’s — initially a pop-up by Rob Clement, who worked for Jon Dressler at The Porter’s House restaurant. Think piled-high pastrami, corned beef, and chicken schnitzel sandwiches, matzo ball soup and knishes (savory pastry with filling).

The bakery serves coffee and handcrafted baked goods, many from the recipe books of Dressler’s mom, the legendary Joan Dressler and namesake of the establishment. A favorite is mom’s cheesecake, a staple dessert from Dressler’s restaurants — just like mom used to make. The hours are short — Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. — but if you can swing by, it’s worth it for a sandwich or a slice, especially on the patio overlooking the Little Sugar Creek Greenway.

BEST OLD RESTAURANT: Original Chicken & Ribs

Located in the Historic West End, just across the street from the Washington Heights neighborhood,

Original Chicken & Ribs in west Charlotte is the only restaurant left standing from Charlotte’s original Green Book. It opened in 1953 and still remains a humble standalone joint off of Beatties Ford Road, where a loyal, generational following still order at the counter. This space has seen children become adults, become parents, become grandparents. And the owner is no exception; Jermaine Blackmon is the third-generation owner of this take-out only joint.

Original Chicken and Ribs is a valued beacon of the food scene in the West End. As Blackmon’s customers show loyalty through regular purchasing, Blackmon shows his appreciation by offering free lunches to children during certain times of the year. He inherited the restaurant from his grandfather and today remains incredibly active in the restaurant’s day-to-day operations. He’s in the back frying up chicken that doesn’t have even a splotch of dryness left in it, just supple white or dark meat encased in a shattering light fry.

The menu is a mix of homestyle Southern food: the notorious Fat Boy Burger, a pulled pork BBQ sandwich, fried okra, slaw, baked beans, and basically every part of the chicken from wings to gizzards.

BEST FOOD EVENT: Lowcountry Culture Festival

Held during the Charlotte International Arts Festival in September, the fine folks at QCity Metro put on this event around the lake at Ballantyne’s Backyard to celebrate all things Lowcountry: cuisine, soulful music, vibrant art, and the craftsmanship of local makers. Vendors came in from up and down the coasts and wetlands of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida to serve food plates, beer, cocktails and merchandise, from basket-weaving to jewelry.

The food, however, was the real draw, from shrimp and grits to she-crab soup and oysters, proving that there is arguably no better region than the one right in our own backyard, culinarily speaking.

BEST FOOD EVENT OUTSIDE 485: PieBaking Contest at Old North Farm

Located in the rural foothills of Shelby, Old North Farm is a friendly, deeply appreciated, wellrespected produce supplier to chefs in Charlotte. And one half of the Old North Farm duo, Keia Mastrianni, has been a valued voice in Charlotte food writing for years. Run by Mastrianni and her partner Jamie Swofford, Old North is more than a small farm, but a true community hub. They host events throughout the seasons, including farm dinners where folks gather from across the Carolinas to pay homage to

the region’s produce, turning it into masterful meals to share.

On June 30, 100 people presented their pies during the Community Pie-Baking Contest at the farm’s anniversary party. That day, a spread of fruit pies, custard pies and baker’s choice pies lined the judges table. There was something so storybook about the whole event — a wholesome and perhaps even healing quality. It very much embodies the Slow Food movement.

BEST INTERNATIONAL RESTAURANT: Enat Ethiopian Restaurant

On June 17, Tina Tedla celebrated seven years in business at Enat Ethiopian Restaurant, which she opened in Shops at CitiSide at the corner of The Plaza and Eastway Drive in 2017. The location is still open, but she’s since expanded to Optimist Hall, where she hosts a more fast-paced version of the traditional Ethiopian dining experience.

When we spoke over the summer, Tedla explained how she’s seen interest in and demand for Ethiopian food grow in the time since she opened her restaurant.

“Tremendously, it’s growing,” she said. “Especially being at Optimist Hall, that gave us another form of exposure and a lot of traffic. I think the more the city grows, the better it’s going to get. I do think we still have a little bit more to go, but I think we became a lot better since 2017, or even since I moved here, the city itself has tremendously been growing.”

She deserves all the success, but try not to crowd the booth too much when you finally learn about one of Charlotte’s best-kept secrets.

BEST BREWERY: Town Brewing

Charlotte isn’t short on breweries, but it is short on breweries that make sustainable beer. Earlier this year, Town Brewing in Wesley Heights made

the list with its Renew Brew — the first beer in the Carolinas to be brewed with recycled water. First launched in February during the Queen City Brewers Festival, Renew Brew is made with water that has passed through Charlotte Water’s McDowell Wastewater Treatment Plant. It’s a pale ale with 5.2% ABV that’s described as clean, piney and crushable.

The idea behind brewing a beer with recycled water was originally borne out by Jeremy Selan with the Charlotte Beer Collective, who approached Charlotte Water and began to seek out a brewery that would make a good partner for the project. The water used in Town’s Renew Brew is cleaned using state-of-the-art carbon filtering, reverse osmosis, and advanced oxidation, and thoroughly tested for more than 150 potential contaminants.

Similar recycled water beers have been used in other areas of the country including Oregon, Kentucky, California and Arizona. Thanks to Town Brewing, now North Carolina is on the map, too. Who wouldn’t cheers to that?

BEST NEW BREWERY: Panzú Brewery

Opening the Caribbean-inspired Panzú Brewery was anything but a smooth, refreshing process for siblings Johan Marte and Rosa Marte de Pacheco. Every step from the start of the business’s conception was hard-fought, but the co-owners were determined to honor their father through a family-run business, as they had always dreamt of doing.

The name Panzú came from the nickname that Johan and Rose — and their own children after them — called their father: “Papá Panzú,” which translates to “big beer belly guy.” Panzú recently celebrated its one-year anniversary in September. Panzú is the only brewery in Mint Hill, and one that prides itself on brewing a Caribbean-style beer that anyone can drink. The aesthetic of the location

BEST OLD RESTAURANT: ORIGINAL CHICKEN & RIBS

PHOTO BY JAYME JOHNSON

Food & Drink

Readers’ Picks

provides an oasis, a beach getaway smack in the middle of a bustling downtown area.

“We are very connected with the community,” Rosa said. “Mint Hill is part of us and we are part of Mint Hill. I don’t think it’s just another brewery, [Panzú] is like Mint Hill’s clubhouse.”

BEST LOCAL PRODUCT: Redd Rose Vodka

Taylor Redd launched Redd Rose Vodka, a strawberry-lemon-flavored vodka that can be consumed on its own or with a mixer, in 2018 and sold her first bottle in 2020, making it the first and still only Black- and female-owned flavored vodka in the state of North Carolina.

“I’ve been a mixologist for 11 years,” she told Queen City Nerve. “One thing I recognize is the lack of women representation in the industry — and outside of that, even when it comes to the bar owners, the salesman, all of the places. Women dictate the cocktails, but they don’t support us.”

Redd named the product after her grandmother, Rose Redd, an entrepreneur who sold goods at flea markets and eventually expanded to operate her own flea markets, inspiring Taylor to strike out in carving her own path in a male-dominated industry. Redd said she is just getting started. With more flavors being concocted, she thinks her story will plant seeds for others to grow.

“It’s not easy being an entrepreneur,” she said. “Especially when you don’t come from wealth. But there’s a way that you can make it happen, and you have to solely focus on that. If I can help one more person become a full-time entrepreneur, I am more than willing to do that. I’m not here to say it’s easy, but I’m here to say it’s worth it.”

BEST NICHE SELECTION:

The Accidental Baker

Former tennis pro and corporate banker Matt Cabana calls himself The Accidental Baker, but it’s no accident his culinary venture has taken off. In fact, the popularity of his gluten-free and sourdough baked goods have caused him to relocate more than once to keep up with demand.

Cabana opened a brick-and-mortar location at the Metropolitan in Midtown in March, just three months after launching the business from his kitchen at home. In less than six months, demand outpaced supply and Cabana moved The Accidental Baker to Oakhurst, changing his business model to

online ordering instead of walk-up service.

The Accidental Baker offers sourdough loaves, sourdough English muffins, gluten- and dairy-free bagels, gluten-free cheddar and chive biscuits, gluten- and dairy-free focaccia, gluten-free croissants, and gluten- and dairy-free sandwich bread. There’s also seasonal options and sweet baked goods like gluten- and dairy-free cookies, banana breads, and custom cakes and pies.

The new kitchen allows Cabana to multiply his supply, but unlike at the Metropolitan, customers can’t just walk in and buy what’s available. It’s online only and $75 minimum — worth it for Charlotte’s best gluten-free bakery.

BEST LATE-NIGHT MENU: Bar

Hermanita

Simply put, Charlotte got cooler when Bar Hermanita opened. It’s a discreet bar hidden behind an inconspicuous backdoor at El Malo Tacos in Plaza Midwood. The dark but lively atmosphere is reminiscent of a Southern California bar that is reminiscent of an urban Mexican bar.

El Malo’s menu of crushable street tacos, melty birria, and swollen burritos is available until midnight, thank God. So, even if you don’t want to drink, it’s okay to just go for the al pastor tacos, where bites of tender pork are chased by a bit of heat and a squeeze of lime. That’s how pros do it in Tijuana and San Diego.

If you do find yourself lured into more of a latenight party thanks to the live DJ and the baiting sights of salt- and tajin-rimmed cocktails floating around the space, that’s okay too. The cocktail menu leans heavily on agave spirits and has, undoubtedly, the best michelada in town, with biting lime and savory tomato juice. The mere sight of it will open the salivation waterways.

BEST COFFEE PROGRAM: Provided Coffee

In this case, “coffee program” equates to a more general caffeine beverage program. Provided Coffee started as a coffee cart and has evolved into one teensy, tiny cafe in Uptown and one large, sweeping cafe in Concord. Provided keeps coffee, matcha, etc., fun and unpretentious.

Cohen Malz and Preston Rollinz — the bestfriend barista duo — are not pumping massproduced vanilla syrup into slapdash lattes. They are instead crafting seasonal syrups from scratch and steaming oat milk like it’s a precious art. Some past specials on the menu include a banana bread latte,

apricot espresso soda, key-lime matcha, strawberry mocha latte, and the seasonal favorite carrot cake latte.

While this has nothing to do with Provided’s drink quality, do note that the Concord location shares a space with a huge vintage store, which makes for a great day trip just outside of 485. Their social media is also a fun follow; it’s very playful, Gen-Z and has some serious actionable tips for future coffee shop owners or old-fashioned coffee drinkers.

BEST LOCAL ROASTERY: HEX Coffee Roasters

HEX isn’t just the best local roastery in Charlotte, it has grabbed some serious national and global recognition. In fact, it was ranked the 29th best coffee roaster in the world this year. Hello?! However, it’s clear HEX won’t let the attention go to their heads, but will keep doing HEX, recognition or not. The coffee has always been deeply rooted in terroir, utmost quality and relationship-building with their producers in Brazil, Ethiopia, Colombia and beyond. Some HEX blends are zesty, bright, and fruited, while others are spiced and dark chocolatey. Despite the differences in taste, the sourcing and production is consistent and thoughtful. Once the coffee lands in your cup, a pour and a sip feel particularly ritualistic.

The HEX team has its flagship kitchen and cafe in Camp North End, along with a spunky South End coffee oasis called Stablehand and a bubbly, little cobalt blue cafe called Fly Kid Fly in Ballantyne, which all showcase exceptional, genuinely fun, chuggable, crafted beverages not happening elsewhere in the city.

Is caffeine meant to be chugged? Probably not, but some of these iced coffees challenge that notion. At HEX in Camp North End, the Spam musubi and a Japanese curry flex on bland cafe menus. Even if you’re not in Charlotte much, you’re bound to see HEX Coffee used somewhere in the country — probably at a cafe that knows what it’s doing.

BEST HYBRID COFFEE SHOP: Grow Cafe

Stacy and Michael Baker, a married couple with children who live in the Highland Creek area, opened Grow Cafe in July, partnering with Enderly Coffee to supply beverages and baked goods. The kicker is that Grow Cafe caters to parents and children aged 0 to 6, with an innovative play space that includes fun and educational equipment.

The site also offers various activities and hosts family-friendly events in an effort to allow parents to better engage and interact with their children.

Activities include Mommy and Me Yoga, arts and crafts classes, music workshops, and reading sessions featuring local children’s authors.

Stacy’s original business idea looked more like a traditional daycare, but she soon realized that route didn’t suit her vision. She put the idea on hold while she got married and had children, but just as she was ready to revisit her dream of opening a new business in 2020, COVID-19 forced another pause. Despite the unfortunate turn of events, gaining more experience as a parent eventually helped Stacy solidify her plan for a play cafe rather than your runof-the-mill daycare.

“This is something that I’ve been trying to figure out and find out what the vision was,” Stacy told Queen City Nerve. “I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I knew it was a space that families and children could thrive.”

BEST CULINARY PROGRAMMING:

The Urban Haven at The Stead

In February, The Stead at Farmington, an apartment complex in northeast Charlotte, announced a partnership with Mariah Henry to launch The Urban Haven at The Stead, a community garden with culinary programming for residents and neighbors.

The only community garden within 150 acres, The Urban Haven includes raised beds featuring an edible heirloom garden, culinary workshops, “food days,” “field days” and more.

For Henry, the residency is a way to make an impact in someone’s life that can stay with them far beyond serving a dish from a menu and never engaging any further than that.

“The engagement piece, I think, is the main thing,” she told Queen City Nerve. “When you’re at farms or in restaurants, you’re always just providing a service to others, but I wanted to be a catalyst, and when I say that, it is to give them the skills so that they can take it on and maybe do something else with it or just drop a seed to get them to change a mindset and a lifestyle shift, more than anything.”

BEST FOOD TRUCK: Don’s Jamaican Kitchen

With a slogan that reads “Yaad food, yaad style” (that’s “yard” with a Jamaican accent, in case you haven’t caught on), Don’s Jamaican Kitchen serves authentic dishes from Chef Sheldon “Don” Johnson. We’re yet to try a dish we haven’t enjoyed from the truck, from oxtail to butter shrimp, but the curry and jerk dishes are the highlights, whether wings, goat or pulled chicken.

Vegetarians have plenty of great options, too, as

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Johnson offers up a curry vegetable plate that you won’t soon forget.

BEST DESSERTS: The Secret Chocolatier

If life is like a box of chocolates, then you better make sure it’s from The Secret Chocolatier, a Charlotte shop run by a family of chocolate artisans crafting the finest delights in the city. The Secret Chocolatier was conceived when Chef Bill Dietz found himself at a career crossroads. He called a family meeting with his wife, Karen, their daughter Robin Ciordia and her husband Andy, and the four foodies decided to take the plunge into entrepreneurship.

Three years later, after building a following at local farmers markets and retailers, they opened a storefront in Providence Plaza on the corner of Providence and South Sharon Amity roads in south Charlotte.

The Secret Chocolatier offers a variety of bon bons, truffles, butter toffee, chocolate caramels, chocolate bark, boxes of chocolates, and gift baskets. They’ve won awards for their sea salt butter toffee, white chocolate honey toffee, chocolate bourbon pecan pie bites, cinnamon roll bon bons, peanut caramel cups, and plum rooibos truffle.

For those who require a steady supply of chocolate, there’s a Chocolate of the Month Club that delivers a new shipment of chocolates to your door each month.

BEST ICE CREAM: Urban Sweets Co.

Despite closing its doors in November 2023, Urban Sweets Co. owner Kristen Stewart wasn’t worried about how to keep her business going. When she was faced with the reality that she could not justify renewing the lease at her brick-andmortar shop just a year after signing it, she knew she could return to her roots: a mobile pop-up business.

Stewarts’ ice cream company, known for its Charlotte-based flavors like Belmont Banana Pudding, Plaza Midwood Peanut Butter and SouthPark Strawberry Cheesecake, began as a mobile operation from its launch.

“It was just kind of like a natural pivot, and it’s also where we were deriving the majority of our income,” Stewart told Queen City Nerve. “The store really wasn’t doing well, but the events that we were doing [with the mobile cart] paid the bills, especially in the summertime.”

Stewart hasn’t given up on the idea of occupying

another storefront. She said she will give herself a year to decide what to do next in that regard. As for whether or not she’s hit her sweet spot as a business owner, she said she doesn’t believe she has.

“I’m such a big dreamer and I don’t know that I’ll ever hit my sweet spot, if truth really be told,” she said. “I just have such huge growth goals. So I don’t know — ask me that in five years.”

BEST BAKERY: Manolo’s Bakery

There are a lot of fine-tuned, beautiful bakeries in Charlotte, but there simply aren’t any with the mission-driven ethos akin to Manolo’s bakery. Manolo Betancur is a longtime baker and Manolo’s itself has been in the corner of a small shopping center down Central for over 25 years now, originally opened with his partner at the time as Las Delicias. The small business is as essential to the fabric of the city now as it ever has been. Manolo’s has a stellar collection of Latin American baked goods, known for its many iterations of tres leches cake but also offering a bright parade of Colombian pastries, breads, churros, cakes, savory empanadas and cookies.

You can’t separate this bakery from the social justice and community-centered work it has been a part of for decades. As an immigrant himself, Betancur is dedicated to human rights and immigration activism. Following the invasion of Ukraine, he traveled to the country himself and built bread ovens for locals. He started the “We Care” initiative, which raised more than $10,000 for folks displaced or harmed by the invasion. During Hurricane Helene, he created direct donation pipelines that sent money to those affected by the storm every time someone spent money at Manolo’s. It’s the type of care that comes through in the food.

THE GREG COLLIER AWARD FOR BEST CHEF: Oscar Johnson & Daryl Cooper

On Jan. 24, the co-founders of Jimmy Pearls became the only Charlotte establishment to be nominated for the coveted 2024 James Beard Awards, with founders Daryl Cooper and Oscar Johnson named as semifinalists in the Best Chef: Southeast category. According to Cooper, it’s been about authenticity from day one, as cooking serves as a way for people to tell stories of their culture, their history, and their roots, baring their honest souls to loved ones, community members or patrons. This is a sentiment upon which Jimmy Pearls was built.

“Being recognized amongst some of the most dopest chefs in the nation lets me know that staying true to my roots will get me further in life than

way — calls guests and friends “cabrones.” She does food collabs like crazy and clever little menu switch-ups on the regular. She’s paving a new wave, a new standard of chefhood — making it more sustainable, stripped back and personal; if she and her coworkers start to feel burnt out, they take a couple weeks off. It also doesn’t hurt that she knows how to turn a straightforward taco into a melty cheese, multi-process, tender pork, snappy lime phenomenon.

BEST PASTRY CHEF: Lauren Kallenbach

Some people make their work look easy, but Lauren Kallenbach at Virtuoso Breadworks in Waxhaw makes being a pastry chef look hard. And that’s a good thing because being a pastry chef is, simply put, not easy. It’s meticulous, timeconsuming, requiring those who knead the bread and laminate fine layers of pastry dough to rise in the early hours of the morning. Kallenbach owns that and takes it in stride.

anything else,” he told Queen City Nerve following the nomination.

Though they didn’t ultimately win, they’re still going full tilt. Billed as “a Virginia Soul Spot in Charlotte,” Cooper and Johnson launched Jimmy Pearls to pay homage to the history of Black food in the Commonwealth they both once called home. Their “culturally dense” menu includes corn fritters, gizzards, Ma Duke’s Fish Plate, Poke Chop Sammich, and curry roti. They’ve also built a reputation for their oysters, served a number of ways at pop-ups throughout the city.

They moved out of their longtime home in The Market at 7th Street earlier this year and are still on the search for just the right brick-and-mortar location, but in the meantime you can catch them serving out of their food truck at Free Range Brewing every Friday from 5-9 p.m. and Saturday from 4-9 p.m.

BEST EMERGING CHEF: Kimmy Bazan

Kimberly “Kimmy” Bazan is a young chef breaking the mold of what a chef can be. El Veneno, her taco truck, has a palpable personality; it’s fiery, fun and bold. Her menu pays clear homage to her Mexican roots. She — in a very fun, good-hearted

As a wife, mother of two and a business owner, Kallenbach and her partner Ben possess a mesmerizing ability to freshen up the pastry case weekly and come up with clever seasonal bites like the caramel apple pull apart or the garlic dill creme fromage danish. According to Virtuoso’s Instagram, “15 items always hang around, but the other 15/20 change multiple times a week.” While one can find more experimental, whimsical desserts in town, when it comes down to the sweet simplicity of a cottage bakery, Virtuoso is the place. They’re bread bakers, too, serving clean, crusty sourdough, seasonal focaccia and a pillowy Pullman loaf, to name a few. And to top it off, Kallenbach makes the hands-down best almond croissant in town.

BEST ADVOCATE: Cheri Jzar

Having launched their family-operated urban farming business in 2019, since evolving into Deep Roots CPS Farm in northwest Charlotte, Cherie Jzar and her husband Wisdom quickly entered the small group of farmers still operating in Mecklenburg County, and an even smaller group of Black farmers in the area. Since then, the pair have worked to not only increase food access for those in the Beatties Ford Road corridor but to strengthen the network of farmers working toward their own similar missions through advocacy and education.

Cheri launched the Growers Network in 2023 following a Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners meeting in which commissioner Vilma Leake expressed surprise that there were any

BEST BAKERY: MANOLO’S BAKERY PHOTO BY JAYME JOHNSON

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farmers left in the county as the board prepared to accept a $14,000 grant to be put toward a farmland preservation plan.

“I was just furious. I was like, ‘What in the world? You’re about to pass a farmland preservation plan and one of our commissioners is asking who are the farmers?’ So that’s what inspired it,” Cheri told Queen City Nerve in July.

Since the group’s formation, Jzar has continued to help local farmers who often struggle with navigating planning and zoning regulations, teaching them how to capitalize on the continued growth of the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market (CRFM), and advocating for improvements at the market, which helped lead CRFM to finally begin accepting EBT/SNAP payments in August.

BEST NON-ALCOHOLIC DRINK MENU: Counter-

One part fine dining, one part theatrical performance and many parts in between, Counteris pushing the envelope in Charlotte on many levels. It’s known certainly for its thematic food and extensive curated wine list (the Global, Absurd or Insanity wine pairings are exactly that), but the restaurant’s spirit-free pairing is equally as global, absurd and insane.

For many establishments, non-alcoholic options are a second-thought if they are offered at all. At Counter-, the spirit-free drink pairing is priced the exact same as the global wine pair. For some, this price point may be befuddling. However, the price reflects the fact that each drink on the non-

alcoholic pairing is treated with the same respect and creativity as the wine would be. The recipes — including tinctures, shrubs, house-made teas, and sodas (still thinking about the celery cream soda) — are developed weeks, sometimes months, ahead of each new menu. Oftentimes, the drinks are highly personal for the staff, with ingredient ideas rooted in the desire to minimize food waste, like leftover orange rinds turned into a glorious syrupy sip with dessert.

BEST FOOD NONPROFIT: The Bulb

Nearly 15% of Mecklenburg County’s households are considered food insecure. The Bulb is working to address that as a free mobile market dedicated to bringing “produce to the people.” This pop-up farmers market has been around since 2016, now running two donation-based weekly markets to more than a dozen historically food-insecure Charlotte neighborhoods. People don’t have to go out of their way to find fresh food, The Bulb comes to them. They have partnered with local grocery stores like Trader Joe’s as well as several small, sustainable North Carolina and South Carolina farms and other local organizations like Freshlist to procure batches of fresh, lively, seasonal produce and reduce barriers to access.

This approach is double-pronged; not only does it reduce food insecurity and improve health outcomes in neighborhoods, but it reduces food waste from an environmental perspective. Rooted in food sovereignty and food justice principles, plus a take-what-you-need approach, The Bulb is doing

really cool, meaningful under-the-radar nonprofit work in Charlotte.

BEST CULINARY EXPANSION: The Dumpling Lady

Dumpling Lady is now in Optimist Hall, South End and Uptown at The Alley — strategic expansion at its finest. The Dumpling Lady’s silky, zinging dan dan noodles will wake anybody up and the handmade dumplings and dim sum can reinvigorate an under-stimulated palate. And the story of how they got to this point makes the food just taste all the better.

Zhang Qian moved to Charlotte from Chengdu, Sichuan in 2015 to be with her partner, John Nisbet. The two popped up at picnic tables outside bars, transitioned to a food truck in 2016, then opened their first storefront in South End, then became a staple tenant at Optimist Hall before launching their latest endeavor in The Alley at Latta Arcade. It’s clear now that the commitment to made-from-scratch, traditional Sichuan cooking is so tantalizing that The Dumpling Lady has become a household Charlotte name.

BEST BREWERY EXPANSION: Olde Mecklenburg Brewery

Charlotte’s OG brewery, OMB, moved into Ballantyne in June. This is exciting for the old dog because its Yancey location is actually the oldest standing independent brewery in the Queen City, circa 2009 (which is wild cause it’s really not that long ago). You may think it’s ridiculous to celebrate another brewery, but the legitimate joy and feelings of inclusion that the suburbanites have expressed now that The Ballantyne Bowl is up and running is truly endearing. Let the people drink beer! Don’t gatekeep it. Even hyper-concentrated suburbia in south Charlotte, with its trends and perspectives possibly a few years behind the city center, deserves a brewery, too.

The German-style beers here are really quite tasty, but what’s more interesting is how this brewery, whether in Yancey or Ballantyne, isn’t following all the micro-brewery trends. It’s picnic tables and pints of lager. It’s local live music and themed festivals. The food — specifically anything ending in -wurst — is sneaky good, too. That Bavarian pretzel with Düsseldorf mustard and beer cheese will have the Ballantynians breaking any carb-free diets.

BEST BRUNCH: El Puro

This is no cutesy, light bite, beat-around-the

bush brunch. This is a kinetic, in-your-face gorge of a brunch. In this large restaurant, pre-revolutionary 1950s Cuba touches give loud life to the space — cigar cases, glamor in each corner, murals of Cuban cultural icons. There’s a pride for family and history that runs deep here, demonstrated by the friendly service and the live Cuban, Caribbean and Brazilian music throughout the week.

Naturally, the menu is an ode to this business’ Cuban roots as well. Empanadas, tres leches pancakes, lechón asado, and a classic Cubano sandwich. If you’re into a boozy brunch, you’re in luck; the El Puro cocktails go all out. The coconut cream mojito and tamarind aperol spritz are refreshing, but whichever one you choose will be treated, shaken, stirred and served with whimsy and delight.

BEST BREAKFAST ITEM: Breakfast Burrito at Giddy Goat

The miles and miles and miles one would walk, run or bike for the Giddy Goat breakfast burrito. To be transparent, there’s no exact rhyme or reason why these burritos are so good, but when the Saturday morning craving hits, it needs to be satiated.

The tortilla wrap is folded, crisped and golden brown. The interior — whether you order the Goat, the Shaka or the Veggie — is concentrated and soft, a contrast to the bitey crunch on the wrap. All the burrito elements — egg, shredded potatoes, onions and peppers, bacon — are situated cohesively, bound by stringy cheese. The real distinguishing feature is the accompanying dipping sauce, an acidic chimichurri or harissa sauce.

If you’re interested in a Giddy Goat burrito yourself, go early and don’t cower at the line, because there will be one. The early morning runners, the couples, the hungover crowd, and the dog walkers will have already found their rightful spot. Find yours. Just be aware while making plans that this specific item is only served on weekends.

BEST INTERNATIONAL LUNCH: La Shish Kabob

La Shish Kabob is a lunch with a promising ability to get you through the work day. After operating a restaurant in Jerusalem for many years, owner Izzat Freitekh has brought Middle Eastern cuisine, specifically Lebanese, Palestinian and Jordanian options, to Charlotte. Tucked into an international shopping center off of North Sharon Amity Road, customers will follow the aromatic trail of cumin, sage and succulent lamb and find themselves ordering from a small display-case counter.

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What to get? The falafel is made right there in house, with simple, fresh ingredients — chickpeas, onions and parsley. It’s fried to a deep autumn color and crackling form. There’s the textured, yet blanketsoft hummus. The Palestinian mansaf, a lamb cooked in yogurt, is tender to the bone. The lamb kebabs, the half chicken, and the shawarma are sturdy, filling staples. On a surprising, disorienting note, there is a philly cheesesteak and cheeseburger on the menu as well, because why not? Either way, the decadent rice pudding is a lovely closer to wrap your lunch break.

BEST LUNCH: Calle Sol

Colorful Calle Sol’s $10 lunch special in Plaza Midwood can’t be beat. Facing a finite lunch break, workers tunnel toward this corner restaurant on Commonwealth Avenue with urgency. They head to La Cafetería, a hot bar in the back of Calle Sol. To extract that much full, abundant flavor from one entree and two sides for a mere $10 is thievery. Not actually, but kind of. Thinking about how a vanilla latte costs as much really puts it into perspective.

As for what La Cafetería’s actually offering: a rich lechon, a decadent chicken chaufa or a savory picadillo are everyday entree options. However, guests can switch it up on the daily with rotating entree features like ropa vieja or arroz con pollo. Sides choices include rice, black beans, a seasonal veg or soup. No matter the preferred mix-andmatch, the portions are unquestionably large. Calle Sol is delightfully consistent, never slipping up on alive Cuban-Peruvian flavors.

BEST DINNER: Restaurant Constance

Dinner at Restaurant Constance hits different. As a guest, it might feel disorienting at first to be one table of just 10 in the small Wesley Heights restaurant, but settle in and trust the process. Only open for dinner, a meal here involves high-touch service, is markedly personal and very much chefdriven.

Chef Sam Diminich is energized by the work farmers do. He has changed the small-ish menu upwards of 40 times since opening in January 2023. Herby labneh, maitake mushroom bourguignon, and plum wine-braised pork cheeks are a few notable menu items. He gets hype off of his friend’s foraged mushrooms and throws them in a dish for the week. He talks to tables as servers guide guests

through the menu of small plates, entrees and delectable desserts to finish. There’s not a cocktail list here, but a splendid lineup of wine and N/A beverages (an intentional reflection of chef Sam’s own sobriety journey). And maybe that’s another cool thing about Constance — a dinner without the haze of a boozy fog can be quite refreshing. The dining experience is often crystal-clear, senses are heightened, memories are made.

BEST DINNER THAT FEELS LIKE SOMEONE MADE IT AT HOME: Aqua e Vino

Do not equate “made it at home” with a slapdash 30-minute-meal or anything less than true culinary art. Think instead of the type of comfort and caretaking a homemade meal induces. Think instead of a Sunday dinner simmering on the stove all day. It’s slow food, slow dining — that’s the MO here at the hyper-intimate Aqua e Vino in Strawberry Hill.

Chef Gabriele Grigolon has garnered prestigious acclaim from his experiences in Paris, Milan, Monte Carlo … and New Jersey. This 10-year-old restaurant does Italian food the Italian way, mirroring guests’ moods and reflecting nature’s seasons. The menu is antipasti, primi, secondi style. And of course, the pasta, the bread, the just-about-everything is made from scratch. The rock shrimp risotto or Chef Gabriele Grigolon’s “nonna-style” pan-fried chicken will leave an enduring mark. Chef Gabriele and his veteran staff have built relationships with regulars at lunch, dinner, and Saturday morning’s colazione feast. This is a small restaurant sustained by regulars — it’s tucked away, has minimal PR initiatives, and is nothing of the flashy, trendy sort. Yet still, even more so for those reasons, it remains a tenet of Charlotte’s restaurant scene.

BEST SIDE ITEM: Smoky Sweet Potato from Union Barbecue

Barbecue joints across Charlotte have made a name for themselves over the years, but these days, to uphold their names, the people in the pit are putting focus on more than meat. An eyebrowraising side — a salty, smoky, sweet, custardy, nutty side like Union Barbecue’s smoky sweet potato — has the power to define modern barbecue.

Holden Sasser takes traditional Mexican crema, smokes it for 30 minutes and drapes it generously atop the sweet potato, then glitters it with pepitas for a bit of crunch. This side has the skin left on, and the fleshy sweet potato provides a silky, sweet and soft contrast to, you know, meat.

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BEST BURGER: The Royale from Harriet’s Hamburgers

Sometimes, simple is better, and the Royale at Harriet’s Hamburgers is a testament to that. It’s somewhat minimalist, not dressed up in any fancy garb. Hugged between plump Parkerhouse buns are two smash patties blanketed in American cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomato and crinkle-cut pickles. The smash technique on the smashburger makes for a succulent, crisped-on-the-edges patty that has just the right amount of fat to be melty and just the right amount of lean protein to be sturdy. The other elements add a fun crunch, a heat up, a cool down, a zing of acid. While this burger comes with Good Good sauce, get sides of the Dilly Ranch, garlic rosemary aioli and ask for Chef Brian’s Simple Sauce to dip both the burger and fries into.

Harriet’s has cemented itself as a go-to burger joint, gaining its fame at Optimist Hall with retro, eye-catching branding and a pared down menu. Now, it’s got a large brick-and-mortar in the Ballantyne Bowl to further its reach.

BEST PIZZA: Grandma Pizza from Geno D’s

There’s a lot of fuss when it comes to pizza in Charlotte and everyone seems to have a hot take on what we need more or less of in the pizza scene around here. Set far away from all that fuss, in a little corner of The Market at 7th Street, is Geno D’s.

Geno’s does it all well (shoutout to the garlic knots), but where they really shine is the Grandma pie. If you’ve been under a rock for the past several years, Grandma pizza is a Sicilian-style semi-thin crust sheet pan pie, usually with a light tomato sauce or simply crushed tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and a generous portion of olive oil. At its best, a Grandma pizza is both crunchy and soft, chewy and crisp — and Geno’s has it all down pat.

BEST SUSHI: Yama

Yama has been a Charlotte staple for a while now. It can be a casual date night, but really, it may be better off as the spot to go when you don’t want to cook, you’re starving and need a bingeable sushi platter strewn before your very eyes. And good thing the Yama family of restaurants (including SouthPark’s semi-sceney Baku) has a Yama Waverly, a Yama LoSo, and a Yama SouthPark.

Weeknight sushi is all about convenience, and Yama just so happens to have that. There are usually no significant wait times and just enough people in the restaurant to create a buzzy but not over stimulating atmosphere on weeknights. Service is speedy and casual, but still personal. Start with the miso soup and the gyoza. Then dive into the specialty rolls hovering around $15, which tracks on the more affordable side of Charlotte sushi rolls. Hoard the Paul’s spicy tuna roll in soy paper and the spider roll with tempura soft-shell crab to yourself. Or keep it simple with fresh nigiri and a few handrolls which provide a filling, lip-smacking bang for your buck as well.

BEST PLACE NOBODY TALKS ABOUT: Rusty’s Deli

Even when it comes to old Charlotte, Rusty’s Deli & Grille is a deep cut. Tucked into a strip mall (neighbored in a past life by Eckerd Pharmacy and just a few steps down from Blockbuster Video) at the corner of Park Road and Sharon Road West, Rusty’s hasn’t changed a single iota since opening in 1983.

A Seinfeld-era color palette of burgundy and hunter green (with the polished brass honey-oak wood accents to match) unveils itself as you enter, the atmosphere conjuring memories of a simpler time. Grab a complimentary bowl of banana peppers from the jar at the counter and ponder the delistyle menu while burgers sizzle on the grill in the background. They truly offer something for everyone, with everything from cheesesteaks to chicken salad, Rusty’s Serious Chili and baked spuds — enormous twice-baked potatoes stuffed with whatever your heart desires. Every meal at Rusty’s is comforting and filling, with an aftertaste of nostalgia. Rusty’s isn’t doing anything new, but that’s what makes it so special. In a town where it’s hard to recognize the things that used to be and the only constant is change, a visit to Rusty’s feels like coming home.

BEST VEGAN EATERY: VegGeez Plant Based Eatery

VegGeez is a quaint little sit-down eatery in Waxhaw — that also happens to be fully and completely vegan — owned by a couple with a collective background in hospitality, firefighting and vegan cooking. VegGeez isn’t serving up miniscule raw bites of collards and carrots. The food is smothered, drenched, sometimes fried, and plenty hearty. The menu is definitely a sifter, with an amalgam of cuisines. There’s the chili “cheez” burger, chick’n and waffle, a caprese salad with cashew mozzarella, Indonesian cauliflower, a bahn mi, and the best-selling mushroom reuben sandwich. Their sweet treats also deserve a nod. The handcrafted shakes, which come in the classic flavors, are creamy desserts for the milk-averse. The homemade oatmeal raisin cookies will prove to raisinhaters that they will be okay. And how can you not try something that is titled “Sweet & Cozy Carrot Cake?”

BEST TAKEOUT: Sen Mee Noodle House

Life on the east side of Charlotte changes in a blink of an eye these days, and sometimes that means great things. With the move of several

memorable shops over to the same plaza shared by Tommy’s Pub and VisArt Video, just parking your car in one spot midday can make for a whole afternoon of shopping, sipping, and memories.

With the opening of Sen Mee Noodle House in August, in the place where Sosu once stood, lovers of Thai and Vietnamese cuisine as well as those who are new to the Asian styles have a new favorite place to call home in the Queen City. Whether eating in, or taking out, all that come through the doors are greeted warmly by co-owner Jenny Zajac as she, along with co-owners Pailin Wilet, Nana Chandara and Sophia Dong, strive to bring the best qualities out of each dish. Some of the best items to try on the grab-&-go menu are the restaurant’s boat noodles, the pad Thai, and the mama pad KeeMao.

BEST STRIP MALL SPOT: Saigon Palace

Whizzing down South Boulevard, one could be forgiven if they didn’t notice Saigon Palace. The nondescript signage does little to differentiate the restaurant from others as the seemingly endless corridor of strip malls passes by. But, just stop, turn around, whatever. Go there and you won’t miss it again. Saigon Palace has a charming entryway adorned with golden statues, which then gives way to a sea of red tablecloths and green plants speckling the dining room. The experience (and the menu) is markedly authentic. No frills or thrills, just a dizzying array of classic Vietnamese dishes like fresh spring rolls, vermicelli noodles, and pho that might just be the best in all of Charlotte. It may take a while to try all of the over one hundred items offered at Saigon Palace, but it will be a hell of a ride just to try.

BEST POP-UP: Disgruntled Ronin

Disgruntled Ronin is in its percolating phase, having popped up just a few times at Snug Harbor and Substrate this fall. But keep your eyes peeled and your stomach empty because this sandwich-centric menu is gaining steam. Expect sandwiches that are turned on their heads — those that capture the complexity and cohesion of a whole three-course tasting menu in one bite. Eating at Disgruntled Ronin is messy; it’s sloppy, spilling out, not for the faint of heart. The Tonk features a crispy pork char-siu, shiso leaf and pear compote. The Island has a gochu-ginger mayo with mochiko chicken. The Krubbed includes spicy smoked roast beef, kimchi and pickled jalapeño, giving sad roast beef a whole new reputation. Even the buns are homemade. Get the ones with bits of green onion and thank us later.

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BY NEIGHBORHOOD

BEST BALLANTYNE RESTAURANT

Winner: North Italia

Runner Up: Prime Fish Sushi Charlotte

BEST BELMONT RESTAURANT

Winner: Nellie’s Southern Kitchen

Runner Up: The Bottle Tree

BEST EAST CHARLOTTE RESTAURANT

Winner: Lang Van

Runner Up: Customshop

BEST MATTHEWS/MINT HILL RESTAURANT

Winner: New Zealand Cafe

Runner Up: Que Onda Tacos + Tequila

BEST NODA RESTAURANT

Winner: Ever Andalo

Runner Up: Haberdish

BEST NORTH END RESTAURANT

Winner: Curry Gate

Runner Up: Wentworth & Fenn

BEST NORTH MECKLENBURG RESTAURANT

(HUNTERSVILLE, CORNELIUS, DAVIDSON)

Winner: Kindred

Runner Up: eeZ Fusion & Sushi

BEST PINEVILLE RESTAURANT

Winner: Waldhorn Restaurant

Runner Up: Alley 51

BEST PLAZA MIDWOOD RESTAURANT

Winner: Calle Sol Latin Café & Cevicheria

Runner Up: Midwood Smokehouse

BEST SOUTH END RESTAURANT

Winner: Yunta

Runner Up: El Puro Cuban Restaurant

BEST SOUTHPARK RESTAURANT

Winner: Little Mama’s Italian

Runner Up: Steak 48

BEST STEELE CREEK RESTAURANT

Winner: A Piece of Havana

Runner Up: Jim ‘N Nick’s Community Bar-B-Q

BEST UNIVERSITY CITY RESTAURANT

Winner: Banh Mi Brothers

Runner Up: Le Kebab Grill

BEST UPTOWN RESTAURANT

Winner: Fin & Fino

Runner Up: Angeline’s

BEST WEST CHARLOTTE RESTAURANT

Winner: Pinky’s Westside Grill

Runner Up: Restaurant Constance

BY CONCEPT

BEST BAKERY

Winner: Suárez Bakery

Runner Up: The Batch House

BEST BARBEQUE

Winner: Midwood Smokehouse

Runner Up: Jon G’s Barbecue

BEST COFFEE SHOP

Winner: The Giddy Goat Coffee Roasters

Runner Up: Bitty & Beau’s Coffee

BEST DELI

Winner: Rhino Market & Deli

Runner Up: Common Market

BEST FARM-TO-TABLE RESTAURANT

Winner: Customshop

Runner Up: The Artisan’s Palate

BEST FARMERS MARKET

Winner: Charlotte Regional Farmers Market

Runner Up: Matthews Community Farmers’ Market

BEST FOOD TRUCK

Winner: Blasian Asian Way

Runner Up: Katsu Kart

BEST GOURMET/SPECIALTY FOOD STORE

Winner: Pasta & Provisions

Runner Up: Reid’s Fine Foods

BEST HEALTH FOOD STORE

Winner: Berrybrook Farm Natural Foods

Runner Up: Charlotte Supplements

BEST ICE CREAM SHOP

Winner: Two Scoops Creamery

Runner Up: Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams

BEST INTERNATIONAL FOOD STORE

Winner: Super G Mart

Runner Up: Compare Foods

BEST JUICE BAR

Winner: Green Brothers Juice & Smoothie Co.

Runner Up: Clean Juice

BEST SEAFOOD

Winner: Supperland

Runner Up: Caroline’s Oyster Bar

BEST SOUL FOOD

Winner: Mert’s Heart And Soul

Runner Up: Dish

BEST STEAKHOUSE

Winner: Beef ‘N Bottle Steakhouse

Runner Up: Steak 48

BEST TAPAS AND SHAREABLES

Winner: Barcelona Wine Bar

Runner Up: The Artisan’s Palate

BEST VEGAN FOOD

Winner: Oh My Soul

Runner Up: Sanctuary Bistro BY DISH

BEST BAGELS

Winner: Poppy’s Bagels

Runner Up: Family Dough Bagels

BEST BREAKFAST

Winner: The Original Pancake House

Runner Up: Mattie’s Diner

BEST BRUNCH

Winner: The Artisan’s Palate

Runner Up: El Puro Cuban Restaurant

BEST BURGER

Winner: ACE No. 3

Runner Up: Pinky’s Westside Grill

BEST DESSERT

Winner: Amélie’s French Bakery & Café

Runner Up: Restaurant Constance

BEST DOUGHNUTS

Winner: Pepperbox Doughnuts & Coffee

Runner Up: OMG Donuts & Coffee

BEST FRIES

Winner: ACE No. 3

Runner Up: (TIED) What the Fries

Runner Up: (TIED) The Workman’s Friend

BEST FROZEN TREAT

Winner: Two Scoops Creamery

Runner Up: Seemingly Overzealous Ice Cream

BEST HANGOVER FIX

Winner: JackBeagle’s

Runner Up: Rhino Market & Deli Breakfast Burrito

BEST HOT DOG

Winner: JJ’s Red Hots

Runner Up: The Good Wurst Company

BEST LUNCH

Winner: The Artisan’s Palate

Runner Up: El Puro Cuban Restaurant

BEST PHO

Winner: Lang Van

Runner Up: Phở Hoà

BEST PIZZA

Winner: Sal’s Pizza Factory

Runner Up: Bird Pizzeria

BEST RAMEN

Winner: Menya Daruma

Runner Up: JINYA Ramen Bar

BEST SANDWICH

Winner: (TIED) NoDa Bodega

Winner: (TIED) Rhino Market & Deli

Runner Up: Common Market

BEST SPECIALTY/SIGNATURE DISH

Winner: Ceviche at Calle Sol Latin Café & Cevicheria

Runner Up: Loaded Nachos at Soul Miner’s Garden

BEST SUSHI

Winner: New Zealand Cafe

Runner Up: O-Ku Sushi

BEST WINGS

Winner: Moosehead Grill

Runner Up: Chex Grill & Wings

BEST TACOS

Winner: Tacos El Nevado

Runner Up: Cabo Fish Taco

BY CUISINE

BEST AFRICAN CUISINE

Winner: Enat Ethiopian Restaurant

Runner Up: Abugida Ethiopian Cafe & Restaurant

BEST CARIBBEAN CUISINE

Winner: El Puro Cuban Restaurant

Runner Up: Queen City Roti Shop

BEST CHINESE CUISINE

Winner: Lam’s Kitchen

Runner Up: Ho Ho Cherry House

BEST FRENCH CUISINE

Winner: Cafe Monte French Bakery and Bistro

Runner Up: La Belle Helene

BEST INDIAN CUISINE

Winner: Curry Gate

Runner Up: Maharani Indian Cuisine

BEST ITALIAN CUISINE

Winner: Mama Ricotta’s

Runner Up: Ever Andalo

BEST JAPANESE CUISINE

Winner: Menya Daruma

Runner Up: (TIED) New Zealand Cafe

Runner Up: (TIED) O-Ku Sushi

BEST KOREAN CUISINE

Winner: Seoul Food Meat Company

Runner Up: Pepero Korean Restaurant

BEST MEXICAN CUISINE

Winner: La Autentica Mexican Restaurant

Runner Up: Three Amigos Mexican Grill & Cantina

BEST MIDDLE EASTERN CUISINE

Winner: Halal Street Food

Runner Up: Yafo Kitchen

BEST VIETNAMESE CUISINE

Winner: Lang Van

Runner Up: Vietnam Grille

BEST THAI CUISINE

Winner: Thai Taste

Runner Up: Thai House

MISCELLANEOUS ACCOLADES

BEST CHEF

Winner: Andres Kaifer - Customshop

Runner Up: Sam Diminich - Restaurant Constance

BEST LATE-NIGHT EATERY

Winner: Midnight Diner

Runner Up: Benny Pennello’s

BEST LOCAL RESTAURANT GROUP

Winner: Tonidandel-Brown

Runner Up: Marcus Hall - The Cowfish-eeZ Group

BEST LOCALLY FRANCHISED RESTAURANT

Winner: Yafo Kitchen

Runner Up: Viva Chicken

BEST PASTRY CHEF

Winner: Savannah Foltz - Supperland

Runner Up: Ann Marie Stefaney - Restaurant Constance

Food & Drink

Readers’ Picks

BEST PATIO SPACE

Winner: NoDa Company Store

Runner Up: Dilworth Tasting Room

BEST PLACE FOR A BUSINESS LUNCH

Winner: Dean’s Italian Steakhouse

Runner Up: French Quarter Restaurant

BEST WAITSTAFF/SERVICE

Winner: Lang Van

Runner Up: Supperland

FOR THE LOVE OF ALCOHOL

BEST BEER SELECTION (NON-BREWERY)

Winner: Salud Beer Shop

Runner Up: Common Market

BEST BLOODY MARY

Winner: Moo & Brew

Runner Up: Dilworth Tasting Room

BEST BOTTLE SHOP

Winner: Salud Beer Shop

Runner Up: Brawley’s Beverage

BEST BREWERY

Winner: Wooden Robot Brewery

Runner Up: Resident Culture Brewing

BEST COCKTAIL

Winner: Idlewild

Runner Up: Dilworth Tasting Room

BEST DISTILLERY

Winner: Great Wagon Road Distilling Company

Runner Up: Muddy River Distillery

BEST DOG-FRIENDLY BREWERY

Winner: Birdsong Brewing Co.

Runner Up: Petty Thieves Brewing Co.

BEST MOCKTAIL

Winner: Restaurant Constance

Runner Up: (TIED) Billy Sunday

Runner Up: (TIED) Dilworth Tasting Room

BEST NEW BREWERY (LAST TWO YEARS)

Winner: Hi-Wire Brewing Charlotte

Runner Up: Seaboard Brewing, Taproom & Winebar

BEST WINE SELECTION

Winner: Foxcroft Wine Co.

Runner Up: Dilworth Tasting Room

BEST NON-ALCOHOLIC MENU

Winner: Restaurant Constance

Runner Up: Dilworth Tasting Room

BY THE BREW

BEST BLONDE ALE

Winner: Good Morning Vietnam - Wooden Robot Brewery

Runner Up: Golden Boy - Triple C Brewing Company

BEST BROWN ALE

Winner: Lazy Bird Brown- Birdsong Brewing Co.

Runner Up: Call Me Bob - Free Range Brewing

BEST GOSE

Winner: Results May Berry - Divine Barrel Brewing

Runner Up: All You Knead Is Love - Free Range Brewing

BEST HIGH-GRAVITY BEER

Winner: Honey Pie - Birdsong Brewing Co.

Runner Up: Madness of the Light - Petty Thieves Brewing Company

BEST IPA

Winner: Lightning Drops - Resident Culture

Runner Up: What He’s Having - Wooden Robot Brewery

BEST KOLSCH

Winner: Spirit of Radio - Birdsong Brewing Co.

Runner Up: Haymaker - Petty Thieves Brewing Company

BEST LAGER

Winner: Rewind - Birdsong Brewing Co.

Runner Up: Skyline - Petty Thieves Brewing Company

BEST MARZEN/OKTOBERFEST-STYLE BEER

Winner: Mecktoberfest - The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery & Biergarten

Runner Up: Oktoberfest - Triple C Brewing Company

BEST PALE ALE

Winner: Jam Session - NoDa Brewing Company

Runner Up: Renew Brew - Town Brewing Company

BEST PILSNER

Winner: Penguin Pilsner - Legion Brewing Company

Runner Up: Skyline - Petty Thieves Brewing Company

BEST PORTER

Winner: Captain Peanut Butter’s Chocolate

Revenge - NoDa Brewing Company

Runner Up: Captain Peanut Butter’s Tropical Excursion - NoDa Brewing Company

BEST PUMPKIN BEER

Winner: Gordgeous - NoDa Brewing Company

Runner Up: Pumpkin Latte Blonde - Sycamore Brewing

BEST SELTZER

Winner: Big Wave - Divine Barrel Brewing

Runner Up: Drift - Petty Thieves Brewing Company

BEST SOUR

Winner: Fragile Masculinity - Resident Culture

Runner Up: Broken Tarted - Town Brewing Company

BEST STOUT

Winner: Mexicali Stout - Birdsong Brewing Co.

Runner Up: Mama Said Knock You Stout - Town Brewing Company

BEST SPECIALTY/ONE-OFF BEER

Winner: Cheerwine Ale - NoDa Brewing Company

Runner Up: The Diabolical Misunderstanding That Was Neverthere - Burial Beer Co.

CRITICS’ PICKS: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Creatives continue to act as the heart and soul of our city, and therefore the heart and soul of Queen City Nerve.

BEST CREATIVE: Dasia Hood

Dasia Hood is a Charlotte-based artist and curator who incorporates many mediums and focuses on collaboration in her mission to create spaces that celebrate Black culture, art and identity.

This year she launched Dark & Divine, a transformative series that places Black bodies at the center of art and cultural expression. Through figure drawing workshops, creative writing sessions and special events, the series aims to foster a reconnection with the African-American Diaspora’s complex histories and perceptions of the Black body.

The series began with a pop-up exhibit at the Harvey B. Gantt Center in October, and will continue with a full-length exhibit at McColl Center in March 2025 that will feature nude photography, tapestries, paintings and films — each capturing the intimate

narratives of Black bodies in art.

“My mission with Dark & Divine is to spark deeper conversations about Black identity and beauty,” Hood said upon announcing the series in October.

“Amid a culture that often hypersexualizes and distorts the Black body, this series is a celebration of authenticity, artistic freedom, and community connection. The positive response so far has been overwhelming, and I look forward to continuing this journey with both artists and audiences.”

BEST CONNECTOR: Bree Stallings

Few earn the title of “ubiquitous” without falling prey to inflated ego syndrome. Seemingly doing everything, everywhere all at once (in Charlotte, around the country and abroad), Bree Stallings has dodged that bullet and become one of the most important movers and shakers in the local art

BEST CREATIVE: DASIA HOOD

PHOTO BY ROBERT DELK

Arts & Entertainment

Critics’ Picks

ecosphere while remaining rooted in kindness and generosity.

A talented and multimodal artist in her own right, Stallings has really stepped into her own magic as a tastemaker and fairy godmother, linking institutions and power brokers (i.e. the money) with local artists in her role as director of artistic experiences with Blumenthal Arts. Along the way, she has influenced how Charlotte’s powerful see art and how art is made.

Most importantly, Stallings has made this city a little more friendly to those brave souls who want to make their lives as artists here. Anyone actively fighting the creative brain drain that has affected Charlotte for decades deserves a parade, but for now this will have to do.

BEST MURALIST: Sydney Duarte

You’ve seen her work even if you don’t know it: the woman with the ice cream cone on the side of Two Scoops Creamery, or the one hanging upside down off the wall of the WFAE studios in Uptown, or any number of other of her works around town.

This year, Duarte (@traveling_gypsy) has been teaming up with local artists and organizations to pursue bigger missions that beautify the city. Beginning in 2023, she and partner Treazy Treaz curated the collaborative Luminous Lane mural project in partnership with ArtWalks CLT and

Charlotte Center City Partners (read more about that farther down in this list). Then in the summer, Duarte and Treazy helped fellow Charlotte muralist Osiris Rain launch the TAOH Outdoor Gallery in Optimist Park (also read more below).

Most of Duarte’s work aims to spread the message of the international Piece for Peace movement, which she and Treazy Treaz launched in an effort to get people thinking about ways to affect positive change in the world, all centered on the TAOH (The Awakening of Humanity) symbol. When we visited the TAOH Outdoor Gallery in August, she explained how Charlotte’s first graffiti park can amplify that message.

“We hope the culture that we’re creating here is for everyone to feel welcome, everyone to not be afraid to ask a question, for everyone to just cheer each other on.”

BEST ABSTRACT ARTIST: Phillip Larrimore

Erudite, elegant and esoteric. The Wizard of Wingate’s work manages a paradoxical feat; while living firmly in the realm of the abstract, Larrimore’s sculptural paintings, (or are they painted sculptures?) are notably sensuous.

Often defying or subverting representation as such, the artworks that Larrimore crafts insist upon their presence in the room. This dimensionality and tactility are used, one suspects, to ground the more spiritual or abstract elements of the work.

Larrimore’s recent show at Nine Eighteen Nine Studio Gallery was an embarrassment of riches, showing nearly 90 of the artist’s works molded from painted aluminum screening. The shimmering optical effects of Larrimore’s work, and the artist

himself, exist along the delightful axis that magic always inhabits, marrying the tricks and illusions of the mountebank with the insights and illumination of the sage.

BEST NEW ARTIST: Mono Feo

You’d never guess it from his unimposing affect or his soft-spoken voice, but Mono Feo is a bully. No, a terrorist. With art objects and events designed to provoke, shock and offend, Mono Feo is the enfant terrible that the Charlotte art world didn’t know it needed.

Sometimes it’s a gallery show in NoDa steeped in peep show culture and surveillance state

aesthetics. Other times its stealthily (and not quite legally) installed public sculptures that perform an unholy and bestial marriage of the scarecrow and the crucifix.

Most recently it was a multi-day performance that shocked audiences with nudity, screaming and (deliberately?) amateurish acting (the holy trinity of avant-garde theatre) that ended up canceled on its second day as the performance venue was barricaded by some large and very pissed off Catholics.

It remains to be seen what the grotesquery that defines Mono Feo’s work will transform into as he (hopefully) develops into a mature style, but for now it’s a wild ride.

BEST MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ARTIST: KC Marie

At the risk of sounding unbearably cringe, let it be said that perhaps punk rock multi-hyphenate KC Marie’s real medium is friendship. Whether fronting a punk rock band, designing show flyers, or dreaming of a brick-and-mortar shop for her gleefully gross creations (remember rats and slugs are given pride of place in the menagerie of Marie’s imagination), the artist seems most occupied with and motivated by the love she feels for her friends and the scene they have built together.

And, in a world where we have seen postmodernism come and go, why can’t friendship be encountered and evaluated as an artform?

At the very least, the relationships between projects and communities that Marie is embedded in does constitute a sort of friendship of forms, everevolving and engendering new projects and new communities in a riot of creative energy.

BEST GRAPHIC DESIGNER: Dominique Prescott

Through her company Dap Designz, Dominique Prescott, aka Dom the Designer, helps businesses with visual branding, whether they’re starting from scratch or implementing a rebranding. She also owns and operates her online store, Cocoa Butterfly, which showcases her love for vibrant colors, anime and video games while highlighting unique aspects of Black life and culture.

“From plastic-wrapped sofas to Juneteenth celebrations and Sunday night spades games, CU showcases the beauty in the everyday moments that make up our lives,” her website reads. “Acknowledging the gold teeth, the jobs we low-key hate, and our side hustles that fuel our passions.” What draws us in to Dom’s work is her utilization of social media, TikTok specifically (@dapdesignz),

BEST MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ARTIST: KC MARIE

PHOTO BY DAN RUSSELL-PINSON

BEST GRAPHIC DESIGNER: DOMINIQUE PRESCOTT DESIGN BY DOMINIQUE PRESCOTT

BEST ABSTRACT ARTIST: PHILLIP LARRIMORE PHOTO COURTESY OF PHILLIP LARRIMORE

Arts & Entertainment

Critics’ Picks

to give folks an in-depth look at her process with behind-the-scenes footage that follows her from the inkling of an idea to the carry-through.

BEST COSTUME DESIGNER: Margarette Joyner

When people think of Black history, be it African or African-American, they tend to gravitate to the horrors of said history. While learning about the atrocities that occurred during past time periods remains important, other stories exist. In fact, it’s just as critical to spread those narratives that depict Black people as more than being enslaved.

It’s those untold stories that Margarette Joyner wanted to explore in her exhibit, A Legacy of Elegance, which ran at UNC Charlotte’s Projective Eye Gallery in Uptown from March to July.

Showcasing 12 articles of clothing that she designed alongside archival photos from the 19th century, the exhibit highlighted the ways in which Black people have lived a life of elegance over the years.

Joyner, a professor who teaches costume design at UNC Charlotte, combines historical designs with African fabrics to illustrate a story that differs from those shared in many schools.

“A lot of people think that African American history began with slavery,” Joyner told Queen City Nerve. “It did not. We are a royal people — always have been, still are, always will be.”

BEST PERFORMING ARTS ORGANIZATION: Flamingo Revue

Established in 2019, The Flamingo Revue burlesque troupe started as a way for friends to have fun together, co-founder Troy Thresher told us in the lead-up to the company’s five-year anniversary. It was never meant to be what it turned into: a postpandemic catalyst for the revival of burlesque in Charlotte.

The culmination of the Revue’s individual identities makes for a show that is always different but with one constant: empowered performers empower their audience.

Knoxville-based performer Ebony Delight called the experience at a Flamingo Revue show “a transference of energy” between performer and audience, each feeding off of and gaining conviction from the other.

“They don’t even realize that that’s what they’re doing,” she said. “They’re just swapping this energy back and forth and they feel rejuvenated after the

“I was having a lot of people in my social circles and professional wrestling that I admire and like to work with coming into mental barriers and not feeling understood, not feeling like the opportunity was viable for them to be who they wanted to be in this pro wrestling space or to be seen for their full potential,” Lockhart told Queen City Nerve.

For Lockhart, ASÉ Wrestling is all about community. Pulling directly from the translation of ase, a Yoruba word that loosely translates to “life force” or “energy,” he’s not just trying to create a safe space for wrestlers — he wants to cultivate an entire cultural experience for fans, bringing on musicians, radio personalities and larger-than-life figures from the wrestling world.

“It allows the world to be a little bit bigger,” he said. “It gets to be more than just pro-wrestling.”

BEST ARTS FESTIVAL: BOOM Charlotte

show. It’s a fantastic experience.”

“It’s like shedding your skin,” Revue member Ducky Delight added. “It’s like all of your flaws, they’re gone. They’re not there because that’s not what people are seeing and that’s not what you’re feeling.”

BEST SPORTS ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY: ASÉ Wrestling

In 2023, Charlotte native Darius Lockhart founded ASÉ (pronounced ah-SHAY) Wrestling, an independent wrestling company in the Queen City, to address the oftentimes ignored mental health of professional wrestlers.

What started as a small arts festival in the heart of Plaza Midwood has in eight years bloomed — or boomed, one might say — into a year-round art initiative that brings art to those who lack access to Charlotte’s larger art scene and a platform to those fringe artists who may not often get a chance to work or perform in front of crowds.

Growing from what amounted to a block party in 2016, the annual BOOM Charlotte festival has become one of the most diverse multidisciplinary creative gatherings in Charlotte, a unique watering hole for Charlotte’s creative ecosystem featuring mediums ranging from chalk art to classical music.

BOOM Charlotte marked the seventh annual celebration in April, following its mission to bridge traditional divides between social classes, races, and nationalities through transformational art.

The event’s two distinct parts — BOOM Fringe and BOOM Intersection — create an immersive arts atmosphere showcasing contemporary and experimental works created on the fringes of pop culture. You can roam around Intersection and still catch as much culture in one weekend as you might in a year otherwise, but we recommend ponying up for some ticketed Fringe performances next year. You won’t regret it.

BEST NEW ARTS EVENT: Code Red Comedy

If there’s one thing that most comedians can agree on, it’s that there are a number of landmines to maneuver when on stage. It doesn’t matter if it’s stand-up or improv, comics have to be quick on their feet.

Most comics have to figure out how to navigate that landscape on their own, but here in Charlotte, they’ve got Code Red Comedy, a monthly comedy showcase and competition show.

What makes Code Red Comedy different from your average competition is that the landmines are guaranteed.

“In the most basic form, it’s a stand-up comedy show, but it’s different because it’s a competition,” said Carlos Valencia, co-host and founder of the show, which launched in late 2023. “The way that we make it original is that the comics have to deal with adversities during their sets. The concept behind that is that we’re trying to put them through realistic obstacles or interruptions.”

Participants can expect anything from loud noises and sound effects to hecklers planted in the crowd — they might even have to deal with technical difficulties like the mic cutting in and out. Whichever comedian handles their situation the best while performing their set, wins the show.

BEST ANNUAL SERIES: Ayrsley Grand’s Retro Horror Series

Ayrsley Grand Cinemas, a locally owned 12room theater opened in 2006, offers a refreshing alternative to the chain-heavy landscape dominated by companies like Regal and AMC, allowing them to cultivate a unique atmosphere and curate programming unlike any other theater of that size in the city.

“The benefits of being independent is we can play by our own rules,” general manager Josh Leonard told Queen City Nerve.

The best example of how they do so is with the Ayrsley Retro Horror Series, a yearly run of classic horror flicks that rotate throughout the

BEST COSTUME DESIGNER: MARGARETTE JOYNER

PHOTO BY GRANT BALDWIN

BEST NEW ARTS EVENT: CODE RED COMEDY

PHOTO BY BILLY COLLINS

Arts & Entertainment Critics’ Picks

month of October, giving patrons the chance to see films dating back to the mid-20th century on the big screen. This year’s run included flicks like Rosemary’s Baby, An American Werewolf in London, and Possession.

Launched by former general manager Kara Leonard in 2013, the Ayrsley Retro Horror Series saw major success when it expanded to offer double features in 2016 that lasted the whole week, changing films out on a weekly basis. The Retro Horror Series has also never pushed its horror series ticket price past $5, which means you could technically see every movie they run each year for about the price that a normal trip to the theater costs these days.

BEST CULTURAL EVENT: Durag Fest

Local artist and organizer Dammit Wesley launched the annual Durag Fest in 2018 alongside co-founder and CEO Lisa Michelle as a way to best celebrate Juneteenth, providing Black people a safe space where they can be unapologetically Black. Wesley said he settled on the durag as a representation of Black culture because of its ubiquitousness in Black peoples’ lives. Many, if not all, Black people have owned or come into contact with a durag at some point in their lives.

As he’s been known to do with his art, Wesley aimed to switch the narrative around the stigmatized symbol the durag had become.

“The durag was chosen specifically as one of the relics for this festival because of the negative connotations that it has against it,” he told Queen City Nerve in June. Headwear is not limited to durags, headwraps, or the like. In the past, there have been other cultural additions such as South Asian attendees who wore their traditional headwear. They’re all welcome because of what all of these represent from a cultural perspective: protest and preservation.

“We call it a festival, but I view it more as a protest,” he said. “Any opportunity I have to create a space where Black joy can exist in opposition to white supremacy, I’m always here for it.”

BEST WEEKLY ARTS EVENT: Release Therapy

A poet is described by Merriam-Webster as “one who writes poems : a maker of verses.” For Charlotte-based spoken-word artist Greg Murray, however, the title goes deeper and should only be used to describe those who take the craft seriously.

“You are a person being bold enough to express your feelings, thoughts and experiences with other people. There is a responsibility that comes with that,” Murray told us in June. “People trust you enough to be inspired by what you’re saying.”

Murray launched his weekly spoken-word event Release Therapy at Red@28th in 2016. Venue owner Darren “Jaz” Vincent wasn’t originally onboard, as he had hosted past spoken-word events that proved lackluster, but eventually came around.

Release Therapy celebrated its eight-year anniversary in February 2024, maintaining a reputation as a sanctuary for all — a status it has upheld for nearly a decade, even through virtual iterations during the pandemic.

“I felt like there had to be a space where it didn’t matter what your skill set was,” Murray said. “You just needed a place to get something off of your chest.”

BEST FILM EVENT: Charlotte Film Festival

This year marked Charlotte Film Festival’s 16th year in existence, its third year at Independent Picture House (IPH) and its second straight year receiving a record number of submissions. That’s a lot to be proud of.

The 2024 festival took place over six days in September and included more than 100 short films and features from all around the world, spanning all genres and styles. In addition to a wide array of narrative and documentary films, programming included special focus blocks dedicated to student films and animated shorts.

Grab your popcorn — Charlotte Film Festival is

only continuing to grow from here. Organizers said this year’s record number of 622 submissions show a path forward to expand the festival to additional days and screenings by adding new points of focus.

Also, the planned addition of a fourth auditorium to the IPH facilities on Raleigh Street, set to be its largest, will give next year’s festival room to add more interactive elements to screenings.

BEST ARTS EVENT WORTH A ROAD TRIP: Spoleto Festival USA

Held early each summer in Charleston, Spoleto Festival USA is worth the three-hour drive any year you can get there — and there are many days to choose from. For 17 days and nights, the event brings in some of the brightest talents in opera, dance and theatre, as well as choral, jazz, orchestral and contemporary music.

This year saw the return of cellist Yo-Yo Ma along with Jason Isbell and Old Crow Medicine Show, as well as performances of The Song of Rome and a multimedia interpretation of Romeo & Juliet.

The participants typically start getting announced in January of each year. Charleston doesn’t need this festival to put it on the map, but it’s an artistic beacon that calls from the coastline every year. We could always use a little more culture in our lives, so go ahead and mark your calendars for the 49th edition next year, happening May 23-June 8, 2025.

BEST NEW ARTS SERIES: Wavelengths at Goodyear Arts

Curators Jeff Jackson and Ross Wilbanks have been at the forefront of experimental cinema in

Charlotte for over a decade, screening films at such local institutions as Neighborhood Theatre, the McColl Center and both Mint Museums. Of course they’ve also screened Jacques Rivette’s OUT 1 in Wilbanks’ garage, so the duo’s DIY cred remains intact.

They’ve come back this year with a new series that partners Charlotte Magazine with Goodyear Arts and the Independent Picture House (IPH) to offer sampler platters of some of the world’s most accomplished avant-garde filmmakers. The series started at Goodyear Arts and will be followed by 2025 screenings of two landmark works by titans of gorgeous if challenging cinema at IPH: Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch.

Keeping the faith that Charlotte audiences are more sophisticated than many give them credit for, Jackson and Wilbanks have made this town a nexus for great films and people who love them.

BEST CURATION (OUTSIDE ARTISTS): Yvonne Bynoe, How I Got Over

Black history contains a multitude of stories, many of which may go untold forever. In recent years, however, more and more newly discovered stories offer differing perspectives and insight into Black history. These are the stories that influenced Yvonne Bynoe to curate her exhibit, How I Got Over: Contemporary Black Southern Portraiture, A testimony of community, joy, and triumph, which showed at UNC Charlotte’s Rowe Galleries over the summer.

While her exhibit honors the Civil Rights Movement and other social justice issues, those stories weren’t the focus of How I Got Over, as Bynoe sought and selected art that depicted Black Southerners outside of the struggles they’ve faced.

“It’s not to diminish the importance of those topics, but we are multifaceted people,” she continued. “In negating family, community life, I think that they flatten us and make us less interesting. I do think that there’s always a time and a place for that type of social justice art. This was not the exhibition that was for that.”

BEST CURATION (IN STUDIO): Doris Kapner, The Audacity

Opened in early October, The Audacity served as a showcase for McColl Center’s unmatched Studio Artists Program, featuring the work of studio artists Maddie Foss, Melanee Hamilton, Bethany Salisbury, Melissa Stutts, Karina Walter and Betsy Rosen in collaboration with Héctor Vaca Cruz and Kass Small. Curated by studio artist Doris Kapner, The

BEST WEEKLY ARTS EVENT: RELEASE THERAPY

PHOTO BY MICHAELA CATOE

Arts & Entertainment

Critics’ Picks

Audacity examines the conflicting and arbitrary expectations placed on women, often referred to as the “Goldilocks Dilemma,” in which women are criticized for being too much or too little: too loud, too soft, too assertive, too agreeable — rarely seen as “just right.” The results of November’s presidential election make the exhibit all the more urgent.

“As personal freedoms face growing threats, audacity becomes essential,” reads the website. “The exhibition urges viewers to question the restrictions placed on women and their autonomy over their bodies, minds, and roles in society. It envisions a future where women’s roles are shaped by personal choice and empowerment, where they have the audacity to demand equity and shape their own destinies.”

It runs through Jan. 18, 2025, so be sure to catch it while you can.

BEST HISTORICAL EXHIBIT: Charlotte Museum of History, Open Wide the Door

The Charlotte Museum of History in March unveiled the first-ever museum exhibit about Mary Cardwell Dawson, a North Carolina native who founded the nation’s first commercially successful Black opera company in 1941.

Born two hours north of Charlotte in Madison in 1894, Dawson was a trailblazer in the world of classical music.

Her company never performed in her home state due to Jim Crow segregation, but it made its mark nationally by performing in front of integrated crowds and by providing a stage for talented Black performers of the time who went on to break barriers themselves.

The exhibit was the brainchild of Terri L. White, who joined the Charlotte Museum of History in 2022 as its president and CEO. A native of Pittsburgh — where Dawson founded her opera company — White was familiar with Dawson’s legacy and determined to bring the story to North Carolina.

“Creating this exhibit and premiering it in the state where Mary Cardwell Dawson was born feels like a long overdue homecoming,” White said in the lead-up to the opening. “Mary’s contributions to the world of opera were never properly appreciated during her lifetime. The museum is honored to be a part of finally recognizing her visionary legacy here in North Carolina.”

BEST FILM EXHIBIT: Harvey B. Gantt Center, American Gurl

Curated by multimedia artists and producers Zehra Ahmed and Kish Robinson, American Gurl is an ongoing curatorial project featuring work that explores all shades of American dreaming. The Charlotte installment at the Gantt Center has taken shape as a film exhibit featuring eight films by intergenerational artists: Ayanna Dozier, Ja’Tovia Gary, Kilo Kish, Savanah Leaf, LaJuné McMillian, Lorna Simpson, Martine Syms and Carrie Mae Weems.

Through their films, each artist explores their own curiosity around the perspectives and nuances within the Black feminine experience and their relationships with beauty, success, freedom and power in America.

BEST GALLERY: Elder Gallery of Contemporary Art

Always respect your elders, because they’re the ones with the insight and perspective you can only gain over time. In Charlotte’s art world, respect your

Elder, as the gallery has for years been consistent in pushing boundaries and cultivating thoughtprovoking exploration of all sorts of topics through its exhibits and events.

Let’s take a look, for example, at the three topnotch exhibits that happen to all be showing on the gallery floor as this paper goes to print: Recalibrate, a three-person exhibition exploring the concepts of transition and transformation through the works of gallery artists William Noguera and Stacy Utley as well as visiting artist Levi Robinson; re:LOCATE, the gallery’s first solo exhibition from renowned Charlotte-based artist Carla Aaron-Lopez; and Impressions Pt. III: Being Human, which explores the complexities of the lived human experience with emphasis on identity, attachment, and the inner world through the work of recent Winthrop graduates Griffin Cordell, Jewel Edwards, Sydney Gambrell and Kenny Ray.

And when that impressive lineup of exhibitions comes down on Nov. 23, the one thing we can bet on is that Elder has something stimulating in the works to replace them.

BEST NEW PUBLIC ART: Deborah Triplett Mural by Sharon Dowell

Friends and fans of late local artist Deborah Triplett gathered in Plaza Midwood/Commonwealth in May for the unveiling of Sharon Dowell’s mural that pays respects to the impactful Charlotte photographer and creative.

Dowell included a portrait of Triplett in the mural, which stands on a rental building next to Moxie Mercantile on Commonwealth Avenue.

Triplett, who founded Yard Art Day in Plaza Midwood, was a friend and ardent supporter of artists throughout the city. To celebrate and memorialize her passion for art and community, a team of local artists created the vibrant mural in the hopes that it will serve as a lasting tribute and a focal point for the Plaza Midwood and Commonwealth neighborhoods.

“I myself as an artist was touched by [Deborah Triplett] in my early 20s,” Dowell told Queen City Nerve at the unveiling. “She was such a force, I personally felt so empowered by her and she was just an inspiration for me and so many other artists that I know.”

BEST COLLABORATIVE PUBLIC ART PROJECT: Luminous Lane

Luminous Lane got its beginnings during a Charlotte SHOUT! Spray Jam in 2023, when Sydney Duarte and Treazy Treaz curated a collection of more than 40 artists to fill a neglected alley between East 3rd and East 4th streets with light and color, transforming it into an inviting and welcoming street-art gallery.

In 2024, the team expanded the project outside of the laneway onto East 3rd, building on their Piece For Peace Movement project. A total of 52 artists now have work included in the sprawling designs of Luminous Lane, including Brett “TWOKAT” Toukatly, Rebecca Lipps, Abel Jackson, DeNeer Davis, Osiris Rain, Matt Moore and others.

“The theme ‘Bringing light to dark places’ is how I live my life, leaving every person, place and space better than I found it,” wrote Duarte, who contributed a mural depicting Benki Piyako, a spiritual and political leader of the Ashaninka people that she works with in Brazil.

BEST ZINE: Heaven Seven Magazine

Promoters, photographers, bloggers and dedicated supporters have as big a role within the DIY scene as those who create the music. Alonso Barrera, also known as Alonso Morning, has found his role in this community with Heaven Seven Magazine.

BEST HISTORICAL EXHIBIT: CHARLOTTE MUSEUM OF HISTORY, OPEN WIDE THE DOOR PHOTO BY TEENIE HARRIS

COLLABORATIVE PUBLIC ART PROJECT: LUMINOUS LANE

PHOTO BY JAYME JOHNSON

Arts & Entertainment Critics’ Picks

Morning launched Heaven Seven Magazine in late 2023, describing the small publication as a DIY zine focused on Charlotte’s underground subculture. Per Morning’s mission statement, the zine is “collaged from the moleskins of local weirdos and dedicated to promoting their voices.”

Heaven Seven aims to create a space in which individuals can create, contribute and collaborate to form and cultivate a community based on supporting and inspiring others. One day, Morning hopes Heaven Seven can organize events centered around local music.

“I want to have a community around the zine so when people are looking to get involved in the scene, they have a place to go,” he said. “I want it to be a hub for people to find other artists that they like and meet like-minded people.”

BEST DANCE PRODUCTION: Beyond the Surface by Charlotte Ballet

The new Charlotte Ballet season got off to a blazing beginning in October, with the troupe looking fresher and younger than ever during the premiere of Beyond the Surface at the McBrideBonnefoux Center for Dance. The production included two world premiere hatchlings from Omar Román de Jesús and Mthuthuzeli November, plus a third Charlotte Ballet commission by Jennifer Archibald, HdrM, that had its premiere less than two years ago in the same studio.

Archibald’s ability to mesh expressive movement to a soundtrack of musical compositions by Ludwig Ronquist, Heilung, and Federico Albanese stood out more boldly than ever after the more abstract and surreal De Jesús piece, while November’s Vibes & Variations was the most celebratory and carefree piece of the night.

BEST DANCER/TROUPE: Baran Dance

Is Audrey Baran the lead dancer at Baran Dance or is she the lead choreographer? Yes! Baran is still the throbbing heart of her company’s performances and choreography, but after 12 years at the forefront, Baran admits she’s withdrawing — a little.

“It’s been nice for me to relinquish some of the creative work and also to lean into that mentorship role that Baran Dance is really focused on,” she explained in the lead-up to her company’s production of Homegrown in June.

“For a while, when I was the only choreographer in the company, I was performing so much in my own work, which is really hard to do. So I’m leaning into being just solely the choreographer for the pieces that I make and then being a dancer in other people’s work.”

For Baran to say that she is “a dancer” in these latter works is shameless modesty, grossly understating her enduring energy, her luminous grace and her expressive charisma on the floor. Nor was the originality of Homegrown limited to the performances and the choreography we will see; all of the music was also original and homegrown, with local musicians like Liza Ortiz and Elonzo Wesley scoring performances about immigration and gun violence in schools, respectively.

“By cross pollinating and creating interdisciplinary projects together, our … works only get richer and more multifaceted,” she told Y’All Weekly in 2022.

Now Baran’s giving you a chance to be a part of the company’s work. Take their open company classes on Sundays for as little as $5 and, until Dec. 15, you can suggest an idea for their BIG MOVES: BIG IDEAS concert in spring 2025.

BEST BOOK (FICTION): ‘The Girls We Sent Away’ by Meagan Church

Released in March, Meagan Church’s book The Girls We Sent Away is a historical fiction that tells of a young girl, Lorraine, growing up in a Charlotte suburb in the 1960s with her eyes on valedictorian status when an unplanned pregnancy rips her from her family and finds her sent away to a home for unwed mothers.

The story takes place in the Baby Scoop Era, an oft-forgotten period in US history, starting after the end of World War II and ending around 1972, when countless girls and women experiencing premarital pregnancies were sent off to maternity homes. There they would carry out their pregnancy to term, only to then be in some cases forced or pressured to give the baby up for adoption.

“As soon as the book was released, I’ve been getting emails from women, or a lot of times at events there will be somebody who waits at the end of the line and then leans in and whispers their story to me,” she told Queen City Nerve.

“The Washington Post and that coverage is great, but it’s really these women sharing their experiences, whether it’s personal or second-hand or whatever, and just being thankful that a book is starting a conversation to bring awareness to what really has been overlooked at this point.”

BEST NEW BOOKSTORE: Troubadour Booksellers

Long known for his work on local stages, Scott Tynes-Miller opened his bookshop, Troubadour Booksellers, in east Charlotte in October after mulling over the idea for several years.

“It had been a dream for a long time and after COVID I started really thinking about it and the more I thought about it and the more I talked about it the more real it seemed,” he told Queen City Nerve. “It was certainly inspiring to attend conferences and meet other people on the same journey. Maybe it wasn’t a completely crazy idea. There are reasonable people out there doing this. And I’m one of them. This is really happening! People want books in their lives and bookshops in their communities. Bookshops can actually be at the center of communities.”

This commitment to community, a likely holdover from his years working local stages, is what sets an independent bookshop apart from an Amazon or even a Barnes and Noble, and we can never have too many indie businesses centering their surrounding community around.

BEST PIVOT: Brian Hester

Brian Hester, an avid, self-taught fly-fishing enthusiast and visual arts teacher, launched a flyfishing group for students at Myers Park High School in the hopes of sharing his passion.

After noticing that the majority of the group were white boys, Hester set out with the intention of recruiting BIPOC women to join the club.

Long known locally as a visual artist who often depicted scenes inspired by his fly-fishing expeditions, he eventually decided his experience with the Anglers Club had to be told through a different medium. So alongside artist and teacher on his resume he added novelist.

What resulted was his debut novel She Talks to Fish, a coming-of-age story about Maya, a Black girl who takes up fly-fishing under the guidance of her mentor, Ed Myers, all while defying stereotypes, bigotry, nature and death with immeasurable perseverance.

“[The Anglers Club] actually prompted me to tell this story, to build a fiction novel where anybody could read it and walk away feeling inspired, empowered, enlightened,” Hester told Queen City Nerve.

“It was about belonging; some people don’t occupy a certain space because somebody [else] has already been there or they feel as though actually that space belongs to them and only them. This story is to tell you to go occupy that space.”

BEST NEW BOOKSTORE: TROUBADOUR BOOKSELLERS

PHOTO BY MATT COSPER

BEST DANCER/TROUPE: BARAN DANCE

PHOTO BY PERRY TANNENBAUM

Arts & Entertainment

Critics’ Picks

BEST THEATRE PRODUCTION: Three Bone Theatre, ‘Mojada’

Art is subjective, and it’s not lost on us that perhaps it’s folly to rank artistic experiences that have vastly different meanings depending on the person experiencing the work.

However, we’re willing to go out on a limb and say the work Three Bone Theatre is doing in Charlotte’s West End is some of the most important artistic work in Charlotte, and Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles is the platonic ideal of everything the troupe seeks to accomplish. Themes of racism, immigration, and trauma can be found throughout Three Bone’s output, and Mojada keeps all of those at the forefront with a devastating performance by Sonia Rosales McLeod in the titular role.

The Luis Alfaro-penned play is based on Medea by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides, with a Chicano twist. It’s the latest work in Alfaro’s Greek Trilogy, but the first of the three works to debut at Three Bone. If you missed Mojada, you can still catch the other works in the trilogy over the next two seasons.

BEST IMMERSIVE THEATRE PRODUCTION: Mixed Media Productions,

‘Kudzu: A Story of Belonging’

With its latest production, Kudzu: A Story of Belonging, local Black-led artist collective Mixed Metaphors Productions explored what it means to call Charlotte home, combining theatre, music and art to inspect the intersection of housing justice and home.

Partnering with QC Family Tree (QCFT), a neighborhood-based community development organization located in Enderly Park where members and allies strive for social justice, Kudzu took 10 attendees per showing through and around the QCFT house on Parkway Avenue, exploring the many sides of the housing justice issue.

From the company that brought FixaPlate and SwimCap to Charlotte’s introspective theatre patrons, MMP is consistently experimenting with nontraditional, immersive ways to better draw the audience in and engage with a subject rather than allow themselves to be passive observers. They drew the title for the production from the history of the kudzu vine, an invasive plant that was introduced to the US from Asia in the 1930s.

“For our work, intimacy is key,” MMP cofounder Kat Martin told Queen City Nerve in August. “Because of the immersive nature where we really are dropping you into the story, the immediacy that happens in hyper-intimate settings is really key to activating people.”

BEST COMEDIC THEATRE PRODUCTION: PaperHouse Theatre, ‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’

PaperHouse Theatre’s August run of The Mystery of Irma Vep, a Charles Ludlum gem not seen in Charlotte since 1993, was far more than a loving revival, and far more than a couple of hambone actors led by an unusually comical director — though it was also both of those things. This production at VisArt Video was also pure out-of-thisworld madness, a starburst of hysteria fueled by a team of four directors feverishly brainstorming in the merciless grip of writer’s room giddiness.

Who can possibly care about enough to include a three-inch square napkin that reads “Homo Sweet Home” on the set? Who would conceive of taking the one underground scene in Irma Vep outdoors? And the rolling pin … well, you’ll just have to hope that PaperHouse brings Irma Vep back for another run in 2025 to see what happens with the rolling pin.

BEST ONE-PERSON SHOW: Mia Love Live, ‘My Brain on Anxiety: The Detailed Experience of an Anxious, Black Woman’

There’s nothing easy about anxiety, but when it comes to dealing with it, hiding from the issue is the most simple way out. Putting it on full display to discuss in front of thousands of people is another thing entirely. But if that’s what it takes to address something often considered taboo, then that’s what Mia Love Live is willing to do.

Drawing on her experience as a radio personality, poet and writer, Mia Love Live is the force behind This is My Brain on Anxiety: The Detailed Experience of an Anxious, Black Woman, a onewoman show that focuses on navigating through life as … well, an anxious Black woman. The show ran at Booth Playhouse in February, but before then,

she explained to Queen City Nerve that it’s all about drawing attention to an uncomfortable topic.

“I just want the influence and the impact to be great so that people will start to have the conversation about their mental health, their wellbeing, and what it looks like,” she said. “A lot of people are probably sitting around like this is the norm. I don’t want people to feel like that’s okay, because it’s not. It’s not the norm. It feels like the norm because that’s the only thing you’ve done for so long.”

BEST ACTOR: Ashby Blakely

Before taking the role of Bruce in Davidson Community Players’ production of Fun Home, or reprising his roles in PaperHouse Theatre’s second sold-out production of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at VisArt Video, Ashby Blakely put together a twodecade-long list of credits in the Carolinas.

Blakely has starred or featured in numerous productions with Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, Charlotte Squawks, Theatre Charlotte, CPCC, Actors Theatre of Charlotte (RIP), Carowinds, and Festival Stage of Winston-Salem.

What made the journeyman actor’s performance in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home stand out was the subtlety he brought to a role, based on Bechdel’s own closeted father, in a play that is quickly becoming part of musical theatre’s modernday canon. Queen City Nerve theatre critic Perry Tannenbaum’s review of Fun Home, he wrote that Blakely is “as varied, complex, and nuanced as we’ve ever seen him as Bruce.”

BEST ACTRESS: Nonye Obichere

Like Nonye Obichere’s rifle-wielding Sara, Three Bone Theatre can’t miss — and their production of Dominique Morriseau’s Confederates gave us some of the best performances in Charlotte this year. Obichere’s portrayal of an enslaved woman fighting

for her very humanity in her Three Bone debut stood out in a play showcasing the trials and trauma faced by Black women across generations.

Writing for Nerve, Perry Tannenbaum called Obichere’s performance “vivid, shocking and memorable,” while Y’all Weekly’s Jesse Boykin Kimmel was equally impressed, writing that Obichere is “heartbreaking and inspiring as Sara, exhausted by a lifetime of dehumanization, disappointment, and pain.”

Obichere is no stranger to Charlotte’s theatre scene with a resume that includes roles at Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, ATC, Theatre Charlotte, and Queen City Theatre Company, but given her work in Confederates and the quality of the works we’ve seen at the Arts Factory this year, we hope the first won’t be the last time we see her collaborate with Three Bone.

BEST POTENTIAL TO BE A BREAKOUT STAR: Lacey Caroline

At just 17 years old, Lacey Caroline started off 2024 with a plethora of roles including a lead in A Chorus Line, put on by Davidson Community Players (DCP) in Mooresville, and Elsa in DCP’s run of Disney’s Frozen JR. at Cain Center for the Arts in Cornelius, plus a part in Metrolina Theatre Association’s production of Be More Chill.

Having also appeared in the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie A Christmas Love Story alongside Kristen Chenowith, played Young Sam in Jessica Michale Davis’ debut feature film Escaping Ohio, and filmed a pilot teen drama titled Rise to Fame, among other roles, Caroline is just getting started.

When we spoke in January, Caroline said she hoped to star in a period piece and be part of a long-running TV series, but her long-term goal is directing. Her years of paying close attention on set and learning from past directors have given her the opportunity to co-direct a few projects already.

“That little spark of doing a little something just made me want it more,” she said. “I love learning from people if I can because I’m the type of person where I always have to be improving otherwise I feel like I’m in a rut or like I’m not necessarily good enough. I always have to be getting better and, with acting and directing, I really take that to heart.”

Since we last spoke, Caroline turned 18 and struck out for Hollywood, where we expect big things from her sooner than later.

BEST NEW ARTS SPACE: TAOH Outdoor Gallery

Touted as Charlotte’s first graffiti park, TAOH Outdoor Gallery gives local artists of all stripes a

BEST THEATRE PRODUCTION: THREE BONE THEATRE, ‘MOJADA’

PHOTO BY BECKY SCHULTZ

Arts & Entertainment

place to practice their craft — be it spray-paint, sculpting, installations, chalk art or whatever.

Located on an undeveloped lot at 2200 North Brevard St., the innovative space was created by local muralist Osiris Rain in partnership with the Piece for Peace Movement, Proffitt Dixon Partners, Art Wallks CLT and many of Rain’s peers in the local creative community. The gallery is meant to serve not only as an incubator for local artists but a gathering place for all types of creatives to come together and build community. Though the space will eventually be developed, it is meant to serve as a pilot of sorts so that Rain can eventually acquire space for a permanent park.

“The beauty of it and the goal is to show that it works, show that it adds value to the community, show that it creates a space for interaction, dialogue, and growth to occur, and to be able to present that case study to the city and to Park and Rec in a convincing manner so that we can establish a permanent space through the city,” he explained.

BEST ACTIVATION: Activation Studios

When Arts+ announced it had finally found a permanent home in the old Plaza Presbyterian Church on the border of Plaza Midwood and Villa Heights in July 2023, they anticipated a three-year property upfit.

As that process is ongoing, however, the organization has found ways to cultivate the arts scene on the property at 2304 The Plaza. Their recent deal to sublet the building on the north side of the campus to local artists has led to the formation of

Activation Studios, a DIY studio space and art gallery that provides much-needed affordable space to local independent artists.

Queen City Nerve toured the facility in October with Matt Alvis, also known as @stencilspray, who co-founded Activation Studios and works as operations manager at the site, to see the wide range of work being done there: murals, canvas painting, sculptures, installations, poetry, music and more.

Formerly used by church staff as a schoolhouse and then office space and storage, the team of artists at Activation have stayed true to the name, carrying out a DIY renovation effort that has turned the space into an active incubator for arts in Charlotte.

Like TAOH Outdoor Gallery, which is located on a site that’s already slated for development, Alvis called Activation Studios an example of “guerrilla property usage for art.”

“I want to see more proactive property owners reaching out and saying, ‘Hey, we have this spot that’s going to be untouched for three years. What could you do with it if I gave you X, Y, Z?’ I want to see that outreach from the developers’ side because there are hundreds of thousands of square feet in Charlotte that are locked up under a development plan and otherwise perfectly usable for an artist.”

BEST EXPANSION: Loyd Studios at Camp North End

Queen City Nerve broke the news over the summer that Charlotte-based video production agency Loyd Visuals would open its new studio space and headquarters in Camp North End. The photo, video and podcast studio is a first for the company, which was launched by brothers Khaleel,

Maleek and Najm Loyd in 2016.

Ranging from advertisements and promotional videos to documentaries, Loyd Visuals supports national and international organizations with branding and storytelling initiatives. The company’s past work includes collaborations with the NFL, ESPN and Netflix, as well as international brands such as Airbnb and Honeywell.

Located on the ground floor of the forthcoming residential development Kinship, Loyd Visuals’ new office and studio space features various backdrops for capturing photography, designated space equipped for video production, a podcast recording area and more.

Before acquiring a permanent independent space of its own, Loyd Visuals had worked out of an office at hygge coworking in Camp North End since 2020, where they were surrounded by other creatives and cultural agencies, including Blackowned companies like BlkMrktCLT, DUPP&SWATT, and Kicks & Fros.

“During the past three years, we have experienced all that Charlotte and Camp North End has to offer and are convinced that the dynamic atmosphere here, especially for creatives, makes it the perfect place for us to plant our roots in the community with our first office and studio space,” said Khaleel.

MOST EXCITING DEVELOPMENT: Blume Studios

This year, Blumenthal Arts started offering immersive experiences similar to the widelypopular Immersive Van Gogh in a new space called Blume Studios.

A 32,000-square-foot warehouse transformed into an artistic playground, Stage 1 at Blume Studios is free to visit and features art installations, interactive exhibits, a bar and a market. It’s located at 904 Post St., in a former Charlotte Pipe & Foundry

warehouse just outside of Uptown’s Third Ward.

In September, Blumenthal debuted Blume Studios with their first ticketed event, Space Explorers: The Infinite, as part of the 2024 Charlotte International Arts Festival. Touted as an immersive outer space adventure, Space Explorers: The Infinite uses VR technology to place visitors in various locations inside and outside the International Space Station. It’s still running at Blume Studios through Jan. 5, 2025.

With everything from international immersive experiences to multi-media events and shows produced right here in Charlotte, a new generation of creative workers will make Blume Studios a nationally acclaimed destination. We can’t wait to see what’s next.

PHOTO BY RYAN PITKIN

BEST EXPANSION: LOYD STUDIOS AT CAMP NORTH END

PHOTO COURTESY OF LOYD VISUALS

CRITICS’ PICKS: MUSIC

Where would we be without music?

BEST NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL/EVENT: Femme Fest

Callie Wolfe and Joseph Conde, cofounders of Charlotte alt-rock band Oh! You Pretty Things, are well aware that the music industry is still a boys club, riddled with discrimination against women and femme-presenting artists. As members of a popular band with a growing regional audience, they’ve decided to leverage Oh! You Pretty Things’ burgeoning fan base to do something about their chosen industry’s gender inequities.

The result was Femme Fest, an all-day charity music show held on May 11 at The Milestone, featuring 10 bands or artists that have at least one female or femme-presenting member, or are members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

The festival’s proceeds went to Center for Reproductive Rights, Time Out Youth, Saffron, Femme House, Girls Rock Camp Alliance, Women in Music, Abortion Funds and We Rock Charlotte. Conde said the fest sought to mix local charities with national and international organizations that help women entering the music industry, as he’s seen the way sexism plays out in the local scene.

“Fans come up at a show and talk to a guy and [say], ‘Wow, you’re so great!’” he said. “Then they talk to a woman, and it becomes more personal and about their looks.”

The eclectic, impassioned lineup of artists on the Femme Fest bill provided a powerful all-day show, but Femme Fest’s mission and message goes beyond music and the music industry; it’s a rallying cry for embattled communities — a promise and a conviction that the barriers erected by the boys’ club are coming down.

BEST NEW HYBRID FESTIVAL/EVENT: PULSE Experience

Khalif J. Guiden, a rapper and producer also known by stage name RoyalCity LiF, got tired of seeing BIPOC creatives treated as an afterthought in Charlotte scenes, offered only “breadcrumbs” by the institutional organizers in the Queen City. So he joined forces with fellow creatives Shauna Respass, aka ReeCee Raps, and Kazar X to launch the PULSE Xperience, a two-day festival held at Blackbox Theater with a mission to celebrate the diversity of the creative scene in the greater Charlotte area.

“There’s a dynamic in Charlotte at times where there’s so many amazing creatives and artists and designers and things like that, but everyone’s operating in their own silos and their own groups,” he told Queen City Nerve. “The goal is to provide a space where emerging and established artists, brands and creatives can connect and be celebrated.

“Through PULSE, we aim to create an immersive, annual event that builds interest, anticipation and excitement for the future of art, music and culture

in Charlotte and surrounding areas,” he continued.

The festival featured six pillars: music, visual art, fashion, film, dance and cuisine, with more than 50 participating artists spread throughout the mediums.

“Our motto is ‘Creators are the Pulse of the City’ because the creatives bring that culture, that identity to any city,” Guiden said.

BEST NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL/EVENT: FEMME FEST

PHOTO BY DAN RUSSELL-PINSON

Music Critics’ Picks

BEST COLLABORATIVE EVENT: MERGE: Symphonic x Electronic

Building on efforts to increase accessibility and reach more listeners where they are, the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra partnered with Blackbox Theater to launch a series of experimental immersive events called MERGE: Symphonic x Electronic.

The first two shows blended orchestral works performed by the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra (CSO) with contemporary electronic music and an LED projection show, creating a multisensory experience.

MERGE aims to explore the edges of musical possibility alongside live visual artistry. The spring show included works by composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Luther Adams merged with ambient downtempo soundscapes crafted by producer and DJ Push/Pull plus an immersive LED experience created by visual artist Tenorless. The Halloween edition in October created a kaleidoscope of symphonic and electronic music as familiar frightful tunes performed by the Charlotte Symphony were transformed in a playful maze of electronic sounds and rhythms by award-winning composer Ben Hjertmann and paired with striking visual design by Jay Huleatt.

“When these two worlds — classical and electronic — come together, they remind us that at their heart, both are simply tools in the hands of artists,” said Push/Pull in the lead-up to the first event. “Instruments and computers alike sit silently until brought to life by human creativity and passion. This event celebrates the merging of classical music’s tradition, virtuosity and composition with the expansive new sound design possibilities that electronic music provides. As we look forward to this unique blend of past and future, tradition and innovation, we’re reminded of the limitless potential of music to evolve and inspire.”

BEST MUSIC ORGANIZATION: Phoenix Down RPG

Playing a mix of classical, new music and geek chic, Phoenix Down RPG has gained in popularity this year hosting interactive events like Name That Tune and even live-scoring a Super Smash Bros. tournament at Camp North End.

Launched by husband-and-wife duo Dylan Lloyd and Teil Taliesin with a goal to make gaming and the live music experience more accessible, the group is part band and part nonprofit advocacy organization.

On June 20, the city of Charlotte announced that Phoenix Down RPG would receive a $38,252 grant from its Opportunity Fund, part of the city’s new Arts & Culture Plan, which would allow the group to expand its offerings even further through 10 Campfire Tales events (check this issue’s Lifelines section).

“It’s a goal of ours to include as many different creators in the Charlotte area with this project. We want to bring in musicians, visual artists, actors, singers, dancers … you name it,” said Taliesin. “We want to help them not only create a connection with our audiences, but to show their creativity in a new light. They’re storytellers, and we want to have their storytelling through a lens of a community-based, collaborative effort.”

BEST NEW MUSIC ORGANIZATION: SugarTank! Records

Launched by Dreamboat bandmates Nic Pugh (JaggerMouth, Paint Fumes) and Nic Holman (Coughing Dove) in September, SugarTank! Records is a new local label created with a goal to support and celebrate artists within the LGBTQ+ community, including allies.

SugarTank! aims to be a resource hub for LGBTQ+ artists and creatives, hosting events and collaborating within extended networks to provide as many opportunities as possible. The label’s first release, Carolina Compost Vol. 1, featured a wide range of artists from throughout the Carolinas: Comino, Pretty Baby, Midniter, Natalie Carr, Pie Face Girls, BANGZZ, Zeta, Feyleux, Woody, Darby Wilcox, Dirty Flowers, Kadey Ballard, Top Achiever, and Dexter Jordan.

The record was released on Sept. 21 at the inaugural SugarTank! Festival, which featured 12 bands and artists — most of whom appeared on the compilation — performing at three different venues across Plaza Midwood.

“We’ve both been a part of the Charlotte music scene for over a decade now and while the support that’s already out there for musicians is amazing, there simply isn’t enough of it,” Pugh told Queen City Nerve. “Now is a time we feel it’s more important than ever to put our own efforts in the game and be some of that support. We either come together as an unstoppable music community, or passively let the rapidly changing city dictate what happens next in our creative culture.”

BEST MUSIC PHOTOGRAPHER: Dan Russell-Pinson

Often showing up unsolicited to photograph local punk and indie-rock performers at venues

have a sound? In search of an answer, he took his camcorder to interview a number of folks who play important roles in North Carolina hip-hop, including many with whom he has collaborated in the past. Sources range from storied Triangle-area producer Khrysis to NC A&T applied music lecturer Dr. Van Hall to Queen City emcee Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon. Malone presents the answers heuristically, letting the interviewees present their own respective responses — many of which in disagreement with one another — adding minimal narrative interruption himself. North Carolina has been the fertile ground upon which social, spiritual and musical movements have been planted. Malone’s documentary — deploying its own soul aesthetic through his living-room interview style, including in his own family home in Hickory — helps us to see how hip-hop emerges from this much broader tradition.

BEST MUSIC DOCUMENTARY SERIES: ‘Home Movies Music Sessions’

like The Milestone, Petra’s, and The Underground, Dan Russell-Pinson’s photographs are bright and colorful, perfectly capturing the essence of the counterculture. With lights and movement, his pictures translate the experience of live music, making viewers feel as if they were at the show.

He captures performers as their hair sways, as they sing and yell, shred on their instruments or, in the case of Wastoid’s Mike Smith, climb the ceiling.

Crystal clear images with hints of intentional distortion give his photos a unique vibe that matches the respective venue. As an established writer, he knows how to tell a story in multiple mediums. His pictures from the April 14 Daikaju show at The Milestone showcase the audience entranced by flaming drums and crowd surfing, while his effervescent images of Celeste Moonchild during an Oct. 19 Petra’s performance captures light in a way that depicts her soulful music as magical.

BEST MUSIC DOCUMENTARY: ‘Carolina Noise’ by Nigel Malone

If you’re a fan of the Charlotte hip-hop scene, you’ve likely been touched by the imprint of Nigel Malone. Powerfully soft-spoken with a humility that carries the authority of experience, the multitalented creative who’s also known as NXGXL could be described as a jack of all trades. You’ll read more about his production work below, but his documentary release deserves its own flowers.

In his debut documentary film Carolina Noise, Malone asks a simple question that begs a winding, complex answer: Does North Carolina hip-hop

In today’s media landscape, intimacy has built up a bit of market value. TikTok sells us a window into someone’s daily minute moments, Twitter documents our diaristic (and diarrheic) thoughts in short form, Uber lets us ride in other people’s cars and Airbnb lets us briefly live in other people’s homes. As consumers, we appear famished for intimacy, and corporations are eager to feed us bit by pre-packaged bit. Home Movies Music Sessions, a music video series released by the NC-based filmmaking trio Kovasckitz Brothers this year, challenges this trend.

The series comprises 12 episodes thus far, each one featuring a three-song set from a different North Carolina musician, and each one filmed in the musician’s home using only a camcorder, sparse lighting and a boom mic to transport viewers from the content grind of the grid into the lingering intimacy of a living-room performance. Each episode captures candid moments with its respective subject, helping to bring a humanizing vibe to the music fans love.

Instead of serving as just another documentary of performance, the series is about who the artists are as much as what they do. It begs us to slow down and see the humanity of those brave enough to share themselves. Home Movies Music Sessions ask us to linger in the intimacy of the ordinary and to appreciate those who document it.

BEST MUSIC DOC SERIES: ‘HOME MOVIES MUSIC SESSIONS’ PHOTO COURTESY OF KOVASCKITZ BROTHERS

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BEST BAND: Family Video

Blending pop and rock in a way that is somehow not pop-rock, Family Video makes music that plays just as well at a dance party as it does at your local dive bar. It’s far from the mainstream with a sound that feels honest and authentic.

“If late-stage capitalism was a dance party, we’d be soundtracking it.”

That’s how Family Video frontman Josh Shabtai described the industrial/post-punk turn of his band — which has over the last two years expanded to a seven-piece — when Queen City Nerve premiered its single, “Problem With My Heart,” in March. Fusing dark synths, gnarly guitars, New Order drum machines and saxophones into the backdrop of a narrative about a tech billionaire trying and failing to out-tech his own mortality, “Problem With My Heart” is a darkwave anthem with a disturbing message you can dance to, as are the other three tracks on Colors, Family Video’s July EP.

It’s the perfect score for anyone who’d like to two-step into the end of the world.

BEST NEW BAND: Cassettiquette

Believe it or not, the name Cassettiquette came from an especially well-behaved cat. Shortly after the inception of the then-nameless indie-alt band, the members were having a beer at original bass player Hyatt Morrill’s house when someone commented on the great manners of Morrill’s cat, Cassette.

Now a foursome, the band currently consists of Connor Hausman, Emma Freas on keys, Chris Gibson on bass and Trevor Martin on drums.

Though the band has yet to release any music publicly, they’ve played a number of live shows throughout the city this year at venues like Snug Harbor and Petra’s. Crowd-favorites like “Thelma and Louise” and “Disintegrate” draw inspiration from Death Cab for Cutie, Band of Horses, Radiohead and The Killers.

The band recently finished tracking on their debut EP with Jason Scavone at Sioux Sioux Studios, and we expect indie-rock fans to learn in 2025 what the live music patrons already knew in 2024.

BEST COMEBACK: True Optimist

Longtime lovers of the Charlotte music scene know the name Evan Plante from his time playing with a number of punk bands locally and elsewhere — Quad, Pleather, Light the Fuse and Run, Escapists

and others. Some years ago, he found himself detaching from the music scene, worn out by a lifetime of gigging and indifferent about creating new music. He threw himself into his day job as founder of Dockland Designs, work that scratched his creative itch while also paying the bills. He thought he had left music, or at least the creation of it, in the past. He found over time, however, that it wasn’t that easy. Music was a release for Plante, a form of therapy that played an important role in his everyday psyche, a role that couldn’t be replaced.

In 2024, after a years-long hiatus, Plante began making music again, recording at home with his wife Susan Plante (of indie-rock trio Faye) under the name True Optimist. Their album Mental Health released on Aug. 2. The title comes from Evan’s realization that making music was his way of leveling off his anxiety about what was happening in the world around him.

“I tried to quit music and eventually realized music was needed in my life for my mental health,” he told Queen City Nerve.

Those familiar with Plante’s former ventures in music were likely surprised by Mental Health, which sounds like nothing he has ever been a part of. It defies genres, gamboling between Latin jazz, post-disco and any number of other sounds and inspirations. Evan also sings on the project — another first for him, and a pleasant surprise for those of us just happy to have him back in the mix.

BEST RAPPER: MESSIAH!

It’s been a productive year for Charlotte rap collective KILLSWITCH. Consisting of MAVI, Ahmir, Sco, and MESSIAH!, each member of the squad has released new music in 2024. While MAVI has been shining since 2019’s Let the Sun Talk, this year has featured MESSIAH!’s return to Charlotte after moving to L.A. in 2021. Along with a slew of new singles, MESSIAH! released his first album since 2022: the villain wins. As the title suggests, MESSIAH! explores the dueling forces of harm and healing over the course of the 25-minute melancholic album.

Leveraging the power of his iconically resonant voice, MESSIAH! seems to step into his craft with a stronger sense of artistic purpose. His hooks are more hypnotic: “I got a dance date with my fears/ I got an ash tray for my tears/ I got the burden of truth in my hand…”

His delivery is crisper, pushing just ahead of the beat on tracks like “wipe down music” and “dirt don’t hurt” in a way that folds the sonic depth of his voice into the beat itself. His collaborations with MAVI, Niontay, Malaya, and Vayda feel organic

and intentional, absent of the gimmicky quality of some stilted features. the villain wins tells us that MESSIAH! has returned sharper than ever and ready to establish himself as a pillar of the Charlotte hiphop scene.

BEST PRODUCER: NXGXL

The best hip-hop producers are adept at an array of creative forms. As the studio conductor, the producer needs to understand the finer points of lyricism, delivery, engineering, mastering, instrumentation and more. At their root, hiphop producers are multi-hyphenate creatives. No producer in Charlotte embodies this dynamism better than NXGXL. Also known as Nigel Malone, NXGXL has had a prodigiously productive year. As a producer, he has produced for an array of hip-hop artists including Hooli (“Hardaway” and “Decide”) and Ron Lui (“DND”). He has mixed, mastered and engineered full-length projects like J Whit’s Lost Son, money for water’s Traveling Light, and Orlndo’s 2MIL 23 BIEN CABRON, among others. He even released a solo rap project, mixed and mastered by himself, that features the behind-the-scenes engineer and producer in front of the mic.

However, NXGXL’s vision extends beyond the studio. In addition to his debut as a documentarian with Carolina Noise, he launched his masterclass series with the Harvey B. Gantt Center this year.

Reaching middle and high school students, NXGXL has begun equipping the next generation with the key production, engineering and songwriting skills that will help the music industry flourish in Charlotte. While NXGXL isn’t necessarily the producer behind every record in Charlotte’s scene, his fingerprints are all over the most significant movements in the city.

BEST DJ: SkinnyJay

When you first meet Javarian “Jay” Holley, you may not realize you’re being introduced to local legend DJ SkinnyJay. Though adorned in bright hues or effortless neon monochrome, his quiet presence belies a larger-than-life commitment to community, connection and creativity.

A “South Central native by way of Charlotte,” SkinnyJay has a deep reverence for humanitarianism that bleeds into every project he touches coast to coast. After being diagnosed with cancer in 2022, he didn’t give up on his commitment to community. He poured his creative spirit into DJing, something else he could use to foster connection. As a music lover with limitless potential who’d dabbled in music management and built an intentional network, cancer was no match for a man on a mission. On his birthday the following year, he debuted his skills at a SkinnyJay & Friends event. Now two years post-diagnosis, he continues to inspire the Queen City through community-building events, creative collaboration and music, never missing a beat.

BEST SOUND DESIGNER: Jason Hausman

Working out of Hot Sake studios over in South End, Jason Hausman is a consistent inventor and innovator when it comes to soundscapes, an obvious fact to any visitor of the Charlotte International Arts Festival in recent years. Having previously been a partner for 2022’s “Man” and 2023’s “Sky of Bubbles” installations, 2024 saw him pair up with international artist Luke Jerram for “Gaia.” While Jerram’s visual part is the large globe suspended in the air currently at Blume Studios, Hausman’s work

BEST BAND: FAMILY VIDEO

PHOTO BY GRAHAM MORRISON

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on the music accompanying the art piece is what truly uplifts the exhibit.

Collaborating with Deral Monteith, who performs the main piano sections of the extensive track, Hausman’s “Gaia” acts as a homage to the incredible sphere we call home. The multiple layers include string sets, natural recorded sounds such as whale calls, and soft backing vocals performed by local singer/songwriter Emily Sage. The culminated result is a heavenly composition that grants a sense of peace to visitors at the exhibit.

BEST R&B/SOUL ARTIST: JxHINES

Pop your most expensive bottle of champagne and sit back and relax. JxHINES is making music that feels like the VIP section of the hottest club in the city. With sexy lyrics and groovy beats, he gives his listeners the total experience — laid-back but danceable. Heavy bass lines and unique percussion create a unique sound that still feels classic. His most recent single, “2024,” released on Jan. 29, started the year off with a bang. The background sounds of people celebrating the new year complement the rest of the song flawlessly. So far, he has released one album and a handful of singles.

The artist must be used to starting years off strong, as it was in January 2023 that local legend and Grammy winner Anthony Hamilton announced during a trip to Johnson C. Smith University that JxHINES, a JCSU grad himself, would become the first artist signed to Hamilton’s Music Box label. We’re tuned in for what the coming January and 2025 as a whole holds for JxHINES.

BEST POP ARTIST: Lynsea

If you’re looking to dance and also maybe cry a little, look no further than Lynsea. With her personal twist on the classic pop sound and vulnerable lyrics, her music is wholly unique. Each one of her songs tells a new story with startling honesty. Her acoustic tracks strip down her already fantastic songs to breathe a whole new life into them. Coming off a 2023 in which she released one single per month, giving her listeners 12 new windows into her soul, in 2024 she has released two singles: “Loca Por Ti,” a Spanish translation of her song “Crazy For You;” and “hormones,” a synth-y track that doesn’t sacrifice her signature lyrical storytelling.

According to Lynsea, the idea for “hormones” jumped straight from a medical textbook to its manifestation as the emotional alt-pop flair that she

dropped on Aug. 16, celebrating the release with an intimate show at Rosie’s Coffee and Wine Garden.

“I feel like [my songs] are more from that cerebral creative writing [angle],” she told Queen City Nerve. “I’m just such a student at heart that I do want my songs to have some sort of message buried in it somewhere, even if the feeling of it is lighthearted.”

BEST JAZZ: Howard McNair

On July 7, Howard McNair, who performs as Howard B Thy Name 7, celebrated the release of his debut album, Hear Me Out, with a show at Middle C Jazz that doubled as a birthday party, as he would turn 40 years old three days later. McNair’s roots in gospel helped prepare him for a life in jazz, where the ability to improvise trumps all.

“I feel like jazz is the most expressive music,” he told Queen City Nerve. “Between jazz and gospel, it’s the most expressive because the spirit of improvisation is all in it, where I’m not structured to what’s on the page. I can go beyond that.”

Drawing influences from his many musical tastes, McNair can’t pinpoint his exact style of jazz, insisting that he’s reluctant to try because he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed. At the heart of it all, McNair just wants to use his music to make people feel the way great music makes him feel.

“I just want people to feel good,” he said. “I want people to remember their experience, and I want them to feel good.”

BEST BREAKTHROUGH ARTIST: Val Merza

In mid-January, singer-songwriter Val Merza took to Instagram to explain why her music had been deplatformed. Merza shared that Spotify had taken down her vulnerable yet indomitable debut single, “This Is My 23,” claiming that the more than 14,000 streams the tune had garnered were fake, further accusing Merza of buying streams. Fighting back tears, she denied the streaming platform’s allegation.

“I am obviously devastated, because I have worked very hard,” said the full-time musician. Rather than rail against the arbitrary rulings of a godlike streaming platform, however, Merza detailed her plans going forward. She shifted the release of her new single “Hey Stranger” to Bandcamp, celebrating with a show at Tommy’s Pub — one of 60 she already had planned for 2024 at that point.

Having struggled with homelessness after turning 18, resilience is nothing new for Merza, who

has gone on to have one of the strongest years of her career despite beefing with the world’s most powerful music platform.

She dropped her EP Colors in May, with each track inspired by a person who has painted her worldview “in the same way colors paint our vision; indirectly, and in ways that would take centuries of study to fully comprehend.” We’ve got all the time in the world to sit back and listen.

BEST BREAKTHROUGH BAND: blankstate.

Echoing doleful yearnings for yesterday’s lost loves and coming-of-age summers, Charlotte indie pop-rock three-piece blankstate. transports listeners through sun-washed memories of onesided romances and adolescent days spent in the summer sun.

Starting off with bedroom indie-pop sensibilities, adding sugar into broader topics like growing up and moving forward as discussed in their single track “Dinosaur Camp” from 2022 album The World Is Not Kind To These Things, there has always been a maturity lingering behind the minds of the longtime bandmates that can only be expressed from a younger standpoint.

While keeping the danceable sounds that make up their earlier era, blankstate. replaces its softer tones with harder rock instrumentals and an opening up of intrusive feelings through the lyrics that make up the band’s newest EP, Lotus. However, even with the fire present in their most recent work, the tenderness at the heart of the band’s music remains, reliably and thankfully, the same.

BEST EVOLUTION: The Bleus

Active in the Charlotte scene for nearly a decade now, in 2024 The Bleus has shown up with a different set of tricks, elevating themselves from solo hip-hop performer to neo-soul R&B three-piece. With King Noli’s keys and Drum Smoke’s drums in tow, the group’s 2024 three-track EP Forgive Me, I Need That! blends the sounds of funk, alternative R&B and pop built on a foundation of improvisational jazz. Speaking on the shift to performing with a live band, frontwoman Makayla said the new experience reinvigorated her love for making music.

“The connection that we have … when we get together in this mode, it’s like an atmosphere that we create, and unbeknownst to us, it changes every time because of the way that we’re feeling in the moment; sometimes we’re feeling creepier, sometimes we feel sexier,” she said. “It literally just goes wherever it wants to go.”

BEST MULTITASKERS: Sarah Blumenthal & Josh Robbins

Local musician Sarah Blumenthal dropped “just thinking,” the first single from her new solo project TYPEY, in March, followed by a debut self-titled EP on April 16. It marked Blumenthal’s first foray into singersongwriter territory, but it was far from her debut on the Charlotte music scene. In fact, TYPEY marks the fifth project she’s involved in locally. That includes Alright, the band she launched with husband Joshua Robbins; Faye, in which she switches over to bass; and QUAD, a five-piece indie-rock group made up of all three Faye members plus Phillip Wheeler of Junior Astronomers and Evan Plante.

BEST POP ARTIST: LYNSEA

PHOTO BY MADISON LEIGH KING

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Robbins is also known for his work with indierockers Late Bloomer, which returned in March with a new album, Another One Again. Then the couple partnered up again as The Raccoons, a platform for them to meet their goal of releasing new music every month of the year without concern for the response. In fact, they were so unconcerned with critical praise or feedback that they continued releasing new music under different names throughout the year to the point where we lost track of them altogether — there was IVALO, Dog Flats, SLURP, Hardware XO and surely some others we missed. Robbins also debuted his own solo venture, J ANDREW, in May.

And if all that’s not enough, the two continue to own and operate Self Aware Records, which they launched together in 2009. So are there any plans on slowing down? Not likely, according to Blumenthal.

“I’ve learned that playing in four bands is probably too many bands, but I’ll probably play in another one before I stop playing in any of the ones that I’m already in,” she told us in March. “I just love to play music with my friends.”

BEST VOCALIST: Mariah van Kleef

Mariah van Kleef unleashes her elemental and unnerving new single “Saraswati” with a wordless incantation that sighs like a whispering, wavering breeze. As pulsing heartbeat bass, hissing percussion and spectral flute join in, van Kleef’s vocals grow forceful, unsheathing a sawtooth edge. An insistent Middle Eastern groove builds as a battle unfurls amid wheeling woodwinds and coiling synths.

“Two goddesses/ who rode on verses/ but shared their hearses/ as one/ One frail, undelicate/ who wailed like elephant…”

The tune, as contemporary as electronic chillwave, as ancient as an incantation echoing across the centuries, depicts two deities locked in a whirlwind of parry and thrust. Tensions remain unreleased and unresolved. “So you stay here/ I’ll go there/ We’ll never share/ at all…”

Spiraling into a droning reverberating root note, “Saraswati” doesn’t seem to end. Instead, van Kleef’s February single imprints the aural equivalent of a vivid dream, an afterimage burned onto the waking world.

BEST PERFORMERS: Wastoid

Some bands are greater than the sum of their parts, representing something larger than just music. Cultivating a special bond with their fans and

venues to putting her own spin on cover songs during between-band performances at PNC Music Pavilion, Moore has become a fixture throughout the music scene, though she’s made a special home at The Rooster in Gastonia, where she hosts the weekly Singer/Songwriter Open Mics on Wednesdays.

Her smoky vocals showcase strength and range giving new depth to every word she sings. Her soulful lyrics tug on the heartstrings just as easily as a hint of twang can perk up your ears, singing originals and covers with equal emotion. Her musical and personal style will have you paying attention. It’s only a matter of time before her own music stands out from the rest.

BEST NEW SINGER/SONGWRITER: Ali Forrest

BEST COUNTRY/FOLK/AMERICANA: Elonzo Wesley

Singer/songwriter Jeremy Davis has been performing under the moniker Elonzo Wesley for nearly a decade. Whether it’s the full four-piece or a stripped-down solo effort, the beauty of the band’s folk styling is that the sound doesn’t change much from one version to the other. Davis’ smooth-ashoney vocals have always been the driving force behind and in front of the music. It’s the easy-going front-porch vibes that convey the message through and through.

respect from their fellow musicians, Wastoid has earned a revered place in the Charlotte music scene. Wastoid began as a duo in 2021 when frontman Mike Smith and friend Jarret Mintz wrote their first song together, inspired by a Black Lives Matter protest they attended where police trapped and tear-gassed protesters.

Following several personnel changes, the hardrock group has arrived at what could be considered its quintessential lineup of Smith (vocals), Lane Claffee (guitar), Grace Nelson (bass) and Andrew “Tommy” Knockenhauer (drums). There’s nothing quite like the energy the band brings onstage for any show, be it a big or small venue, thanks in large part to Smith’s hyperactive antics. It only takes a few minutes into any given Wastoid show to catch on to the free feeling that Smith embodies on stage. He might be hanging from the ceiling one moment and jumping into the crowd the next.

“You literally just let your body convulse in any direction you want to,” says Smith. “It’s like the only form of freedom I really have in life. It’s the one time where you can get up there and everything’s on your terms for 25 minutes.”

BEST SINGER/SONGWRITER: Jade Moore

Ali Forrest’s debut album, Cagefighter, may not be due out until January 2025, but her EP, Body, has drawn plenty of interest and attention. Indie-rock undertones back the soft twang of her vocals, garnering comparisons to artists such as Waxahatchee and Lizzy McAlpine. Her song “The Maze,” which got a video release in October, helps showcase her sweet vocals and fuzzed-out moments of indie rock while songs like “Weak” lean harder into the rock side.

The dozen videos she has on her YouTube channel, including a handful from the last few months, have a relatively small number of views at the time of this writing, but we’re happy to bet that those numbers are going to grow exponentially in the months and years to come.

Since 2015, Elonzo Wesley has been one of the few Americana constants in the Queen City thanks to an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to songwriting. Songs from yesteryear sound as good as the music they’re writing today. In May, Elonzo Wesley released two singles, “Freedom Rings” and “Thoughts and Prayers,” addressing the country’s gun violence epidemic and the apathy that surrounds it.

“It is one of those topics that can be frighteningly commonplace and yet somehow glazed over at times,” wrote Davis, who played all instruments on the two songs save for pedal-steel guitar, in the lead-up to the release. “One of those things that when it happens in your town you can’t believe it, but it also happens so much it’s hard to even keep up with the blur of details.”

BEST HARDCORE/METAL: Subvertigo

A glimmering curtain of chiming guitars glides in like sudden rain. As sepulchral bass notes toll from deep within the earth, guitarist, lead singer and songwriter Stephen Vorne launches into an

From the heartland of Tennessee to the heart of the Queen City, Jade Moore has established herself as one of the strongest voices performing in Charlotte today. Seen at venues all around the area — from belting out originals at singer-songwriter BEST

BEST SINGER/SONGWRITER: JADE MOORE

PHOTO BY GREGORY MOORE

VOCALIST: MARIAH VAN KLEEF

PHOTO BY BRITTANY NAILON

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anxious vocal: “The world’s moved on without us/ but can you keep yourself?/ This house of cards you stand on/ Will plunge in one small breath…” The opening strains of “Frail” signposts Charlotte fourpiece Subvertigo as a moody shoegaze outfit cast in the image of Disintegration-era The Cure. But first impressions can deceive. Turning deftly on a dime, “Frail” tumbles into heavy metal’s sharp grinding gears. Vorne responds with a guttural roar. It’s a disorienting moment. At first, “Frail” hearkens back to the shimmering cadences of Cocteau Twins. Then, with a sudden whiplash turn, it embraces the bludgeoning power of Black Sabbath. It’s the perfect example of how this four-piece lives on the fence — a metal fence with very sharp edges — giving listeners no warning as to when they might fall on the spikes.

BEST ROCK: SWAE

Calling themselves “post-hardcore romantic shoegaze,” Charlotte rock trio SWAE defies labels and expectations. Just when you think their music is getting more melodic, in comes the thunder; drums crash, guitar rhythms drive the groove and the bass swings behind it all. The lyrical themes touch on everything from the dangers of potentially becoming addicted to opioids (“Aqua”) to the difficulty of finding solid footing in today’s housing market (“Teal”). It’s a fine melting pot of music that can appeal to fans of different genres while the lyrical content conveys enough emotion to pull at the heart strings when needed. Listen closely and you’ll hear hints of Latin influence in the heartfelt lyrics, as well.

BEST EXPERIMENTAL/ELECTRONIC: Solemn Shapes

As one of the most tenured venues in the city, The Milestone Club has acted as an incubator for generations of musicians and bands, allowing artists to develop within its walls through decades of service. Though known for hosting and cultivating punk and hardcore rock acts, those familiar with the venue know that musicians within the dark-wave, experimental and industrial genres thrive there, and in Charlotte, Solemn Shapes is a beloved act that, after each tour around the country, returns to hone their craft in front of a supportive group of homegrown fans.

Blending synthesizers, drum machines and samplers to curate unique tones through distorted beats, sample effects and synths, the duo always brings something new to the table in their audible

presentations. Nothing compares to being in the room during their sets, as the stagecraft created by the band accelerates the already magnetic music put on display, turning any venue into a goth dance party. When their new EP Calling drops on Dec. 6, we’ll be first in line to stream it, but we suggest you also catch them at Milestone or any of the other local venues they play at regularly.

BEST CONCEPTUAL PROJECT:

6 Cardinal, ‘Go Ask Owsley’

Albums that are made to be listened to from front to back are feeling fewer and farther between in the streaming era. There’s an art to that type of setup that allows a curated collection to feel like a movie in which each track takes us to a different scene. It felt as though Charlotte rapper 6 Cardinal and producer King Caiman had this framework in mind when they came together in December 2023 to drop Go Ask Owsley.

The album is an episodic mix of fantasy fiction that occasionally dives into the realm of horror, brought back with strong doses of reality and an overarching theme of doing what it takes to survive in the darkest parts of our lives today. Shorter than a sitcom episode but just long enough to leave listeners with something to chew on, Go Ask Owsley is a curated listen you can pop corn to while also drawing inspiration for the moments when the chips are down.

BEST INSTRUMENTAL PROJECT: Cloutchaser

Fueled by an undying sense of creativity and a mission to steer away from synthetic tendencies in today’s music scene, NC natives Cameron Price and Brady Kennedy blend the explosiveness and energy of 1980s metal with today’s math-rock sensibilities as an instrumental duo. Distinguished by a volatile and dynamic sound that is at once electrifying, melodic and thrashy, guitarist Price and drummer Kennedy are impressive to watch live, offering a riveting performance sans lyrics that serves as the musical equivalent of a lightning strike.

While their visual style may echo that of the ’80s metal scene — the duo regularly forego shirts and rock flowing manes of hair reminiscent of metal icons like Dimebag Darrel and Dave Lombardo — Price and Kennedy found musical inspiration in math-rock bands like Hella and Shake The Baby Til The Love Comes Out. In an era of music production characterized by the use of pre-programmed instruments, Cloutchaser’s vision relies on a more analog approach to songwriting and music production, one centered around artistic viscerality and free-form live performance.

BEST CLASSICAL ARTIST:

Alex Wilborn

Having seen two previously scheduled concertos that he was set to lead get canceled during the pandemic, one in 2020 and another 2021, in March, Charlotte Symphony Orchestra’s (CSO) Alex Wilborn finally got the chance to play principal trumpet in Oskar Böhme’s Concerto in F Minor during CSO’s Wagner & Strauss shows at Knight Theater. While Wilborn had led other trumpet concertos during competitions and other events over his years of schooling, his solo debut with CSO was a special one. Böhme’s Concerto is the only concerto known to be written for trumpet in the Romantic period. Despite that, when we spoke to Wilborn, all he could talk about was how excited he was for all the opportunities the work provided for his colleagues.

“There are a lot of these really beautiful moments that, it’s not just there backing up whoever’s in front, but every section in the orchestra at some point gets to engage with and be a part of,” he said. And here we thought that tooting his own horn was part of the job.

BEST EMO ROCK/POP-PUNK: Momophobia

According to the esoterically titled Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, momophobia means “the fear of speaking off the cuff or from the heart; the terror of saying the wrong thing and having to watch someone’s smile fade as they realize you’re not who they thought you were.” Certainly, a sense of mistaken identities and fast-changing opinions infuses the band’s debut single “Orchid Skies.”

As Sam Howard’s grainy bass-led riff propels the groove forward like a rusted gigantic gear grinding, his vocals rip free from the song’s cocoon of layered thrash to unleash a soaring pop lyric laced with the uncertainty and heartbreak of an averted gaze.

A chugging bass-and-guitar combo burrows through rippling slashes of Santiago Morales’ decaying rhythm guitar before he launches a beautiful yet brutal lead. His guitar chimes, rings and rages, swiftly dovetailing into a shouted, distorted chorus. Howard, Morales and drummer Grayson Gulley play a mix of spiraling melodies, multi-edged meanings and shape-shifting hard rock that’s on full display in the band’s debut five-track EP Duality of Dreams, which dropped in April.

BEST EP: Reuben Vincent, ‘General Admission’

Roc Nation rapper and east Charlotte native Reuben Vincent is an icon in the making. In reviewing

his 2023 debut album Love Is War, Nerve contributor Tyler Bunzey wrote that the long-bubbling Vincent had finally found his true voice. On his second EP, General Admission, which dropped in April, Vincent is fine-tuning that voice. Over hip-hop, R&B and soul influences, Vincent’s earnest lyrics continue to sneak up on you to make you think harder than you had planned on.

With songs like “JUMP,” which features American Idol alum Malaya, you’ll start dancing and grooving before you realize that you are listening to a purely poetic confessional on mental health struggles and what it means to be a Black man in America today. The track is honest and personal, but still has assshakeable instrumentals, a juxtaposition that hooks its listeners in hard.

Opening track “TROOPS” uses a classic rap beat with eerie synth sounds layered on top, creating an unsettling feeling while remaining entirely listenable. The synth vibes continue throughout the EP, adding a new dimension to Vincent’s sound. April was a big month for Vincent, who also collaborated with legendary NC producer 9th Wonder to help create the soundtrack for Netflix’s animated Good Times series. There’s no telling what 2025 has in store for the rapidly ascending artist.

BEST ALBUM: Nia J, ‘Melomania’

If Nia J’s 2021 debut EP Rabbit Hole introduced us to her creative vision, then the singer’s debut fulllength album Melomania, which she released with a show at the NoDa Art Hole on June 28, serves as the burgeoning pop artist’s definitive statement. The 10-song LP explores similar themes as her EP did — lack and abundance, love and loss, etc. — articulated through her signature cutting lyricism and a shapeshifting sound that spans rock, R&B, pop and folk.

“I think there’s definitely a major shift with this album,” Nia J told Queen City Nerve. “I’ve had a lot more time for experiences and practice with writing. I tried to be a little bit more open with how I wrote things, like what I was willing to share.”

This writing practice has manifested in a masterful use of clichés that imbue a folk sensibility — using the imagery and language of the everyday to expose mundane profundity—to her pop performance. The album is neither a celebration of carefree youthfulness nor a navel-gazing diaristic confessional. Rather, through Nia J’s skillful penmanship and the project’s sonic expansiveness, Melomania embodies the very contradictions that its title connotes.

Music Critics’ Picks

BEST SINGLE: Deore, “tell me im in trouble”

Girlies who crushed on their aloof English teachers in high school, please come to the front. Off of her February EP The Brat came this soft and sexy single, tell me im in trouble. Singer Deore lures her listeners in with soft, dreamy vocals and keeps them there with her decidedly bratty lyrics, as well as interesting commentary on how kinks develop.

The light and airy acoustic guitar meets the sultry lyricism in perfect harmony. With lines like “Do your worst daddy/ Break me like a curse…” and “With ribbons in my braids/ And a tongue of razor blades…” this song is clearly for the girls (or anyone really) who like to be told what to do but know it’s more fun when you talk back anyways. It’s sexy but lowkey. It’s not so overt that you can’t listen to it on full blast in your car, stuck in traffic on I-77. It feels like that summer love affair that you probably shouldn’t be having, where anything is possible. It’s Deore’s version of demure … very mindful.

BEST COMEBACK RELEASE: Alexa Jenson, “Just You Wait”

When Pat Moran profiled Alexa Jenson for a Queen City Nerve cover story in March, the local singer/songwriter described her popular 2016 track “Daylight” as “kind of a ‘Fuck you’ song.” Upon the release of her single “Just You Wait,” her first new release in eight years and also one about relationship frustrations, Jenson said she turned the focus of her pen on herself.

“I guess you could describe ‘Just You Wait’ as a ‘Fuck you’ song to myself,” she told Queen City Nerve when we premiered the track in June. “I wrote it when I was unhappy in my relationship at the time, not really sure how to leave. And instead of handling it I was just reckless with my actions, not paying any mind to how they would affect other people.”

The song is a short and not-so-sweet powerpop PSA for those who sport a reckless attitude, using energetic guitar riffs and all-enveloping vocal harmonies interposed with a surprise scream to drive it home. “It’s my teenage late ’90s/early 2000s indie-pop band dream,” she told Moran in March. “It’s my favorite.” Ours, too.

BEST VIDEO: Alan Charmer, “LOST/ CONTROL”

“You said, we can’t go back to sleeping in clothes,” Alan Charmer sings in the video for “LOST/

CONTROL.” The solo project of Junior Astronomers frontman Terrence Richard, Alan Charmer’s music gets the artistic treatment in this four-minute video.

Playing with light and shadow, wide angles and closeups, as well as liquid clouds of colors, Dillon Deaton and Chris Lomartire brought new life to Charmer’s 2021 song.

Their mission to create a claustrophobic feeling while also pushing through ethereal vibes leaves the viewer with plenty of questions of what they just watched – is it emptiness? Loneliness? Hope?

It doesn’t get much clearer on the second or third viewings, instead leaving the viewer to make their own interpretations of any themes, snippets and visuals that are contained within. Just when it starts making a bit of sense, it’s over and worth a rewatch.

BEST VENUE: Petra’s

Petra’s exists at the perfect intersection of comfort, curation and grunge. It’s scruffy enough to feel authentic — whatever that means — while demonstrating obvious care and thoughtfulness in all relevant aspects.

From the rotating menu of signature cocktails to the back room art gallery to the wide range of events hosted nightly at the Plaza Midwood mainstay, Petra’s truly has something for everyone without feeling like they are pandering or aiming for the lowest common denominator.

And because places only really become spaces by virtue of the people who activate them, it would be an incomplete analysis without mentioning that the bar staff and sound engineers at Petra’s have cornered the market on inclusive, nonthreatening pan-erotic dirtbag vibes.

If you haven’t been to Petra’s for a show — be it country, garage rock, folk, hip-hop or jazz depending on the night — what exactly have you been doing?

BEST NEW VENUE: The Long Room

In summer 2023, local dancers Matt Seneca and Sarah Hayes Harkins unveiled their plans for The Long Room, an event space and performance venue located at 1111 Central Avenue, where the east Charlotte corridor intersects with Hawthorne Lane.

“Creative people in Charlotte struggle to find space, and we are often at the mercy of those who own space, be it corporate developers who want to see a profit, breweries who need to sell alcohol, churches which are unlikely to host, say, an LGBTQ ecstatic dance party,” Seneca said at the time. “I wanted to take one big swing in my life and open a space where my value system, one that prioritizes the arts, holds sway.”

They could have paid that lip service and went on renting the room for private events, cashing in on a prime location and booking a show here and there, but in summer of this year they doubled down on the venue goals.

With the launch of TLR Presents in July, The Long Room team looked to provide music patrons with a monthly show on Monday night, an infamously slow night in the scene.

Artists are invited to use the Long Room free of charge for the shows, setting the ticket price point themselves, while the Long Room takes proceeds from the bar.

“It’s a beautiful space for performances and I’m so happy Megan and The Long Room owners have built an event that supports working musicians,” said Madison Lucas, frontwoman of Modern Moxie, which played the opening show on July 1.

“Monday nights are normally a slower night for the scene and we’re so excited to bring a new event to the Charlotte community for an early, familyfriendly option.”

MOST ANTICIPATED VENUE: Rozzelles Ferry Landing

Located on Rozzelles Ferry Road across from Judson Avenue, Rozzelles Ferry Landing aims to serve as a cultural campus that includes an intimate 60-seat music venue, a speakeasy-style bar and lounge, a coffee shop and an outdoor gathering area for families and community members to come together.

Years in the making, Rozzelles Ferry Landing was originally set to open in fall 2023, though Greg Willingham and business partner Keith Anderson hit repeated snags. They originally hoped to simply move into the historic buildings located at 2831 Rozzelles Ferry Road and upfit them for their new needs, though permitting restrictions and other obstacles delayed the process greatly.

At the end of October this year, the team finally opened the doors to The Jam Shak listening room; Eli’s Little House, a speakeasy lounge; The Vinyl Hub coffee shop, wine bar and record store; and The Landing, a community lawn and outdoor stage. They’ve since hosted acts like Leah Simone, Loli De La Rosa and The Groove Masters, offering up a much-needed jazz venue in the Historic West End.

HAPPIEST ENDING: ‘How to Save a Milestone’

When Queen City Nerve first reported on Liz McLaughlin and Jason Arthurs’ efforts to make a documentary about west Charlotte’s legendary music venue The Milestone Club back in 2019, there was no guarantee the building would still be standing by the time they finished. In fact, it felt highly likely that it wouldn’t be.

Fast forward five years, and we’re happy to report that the film, How to Save a Milestone, is finally in the can and, better yet, The Milestone was able to host its first screening back in March. What McLaughlin and Arthurs caught in the end was a tale of a venue scraping to stay alive in the face of a pandemic, under new ownership, in a city where raising rents meant many of The Milestone’s contemporaries were already razed.

“While The Milestone’s rich history is weaved in, the film is really a snapshot of the character of the place,” McLaughlin told us in June. “More than a nostalgic look at the past, it’s a call to action to continue building the Milestone community that is so foundational to the music scene in Charlotte and beyond.”

INFO@QCNERVE.COM

HAPPIEST ENDING: ‘HOW TO SAVE A MILESTONE’

DOCUMENTARY STILL

VISUAL ARTS

BEST ART GALLERY

Winner: The Mint Museum

Runner Up: Petra’s Bar

BEST DISPLAY OF PUBLIC ART

Winner: Camp North End

Runner Up: ArtPop Street Gallery

BEST EXHIBIT

Winner: “Open Wide the Door: The Story of Mary Cardwell Dawson and the National Negro Opera Company” at Charlotte Museum of History

Runner Up: “American Honey” at McColl Center

BEST INSTALLATION ARTIST

Winner: Meredith Connelly

Runner Up: Elizabeth Palmisano

BEST MURALIST

Winner: Bree Stallings

Runner Up: Liz Haywood

BEST MUSEUM

Winner: The Mint Museum

Runner Up: The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture

BEST PHOTOGRAPHER

Winner: Tory April Silinski - TAS Visuals

Runner Up: Gloria Zavaleta

BEST SCULPTOR

Winner: Lee Ko

Runner Up: Grace Stott

BEST TATTOO ARTIST

Winner: Hannah Mckee - Ruby Tiger Tattoo

Studio

Runner Up: Elisa Sanchez - All My Heart Tattoo

Studio

BEST VISUAL ARTIST

Winner: Sydney Duarte

Runner Up: Dammit Wesley

PERFORMING ARTS

BEST ACROBAT

Winner: Madison Cox

Runner Up: Melanie Fox - Cirque du Biere

BEST ACTOR

Winner: Matt Cosper

Runner Up: Devin Clark

BEST ACTRESS

Winner: Cecilia McNeill

Runner Up: Kadey Ballard

BEST CLASSICAL DANCER

Winner: Melody Shanahan

Runner Up: Shefalee Patel

BEST COMEDIAN

Winner: Nathan Baker

Runner Up: Kayla Kandi

BEST COMEDY VENUE

Winner: The Comedy Zone

Runner Up: Starlight on 22nd

BEST CONTEMPORARY DANCER

Winner: Audrey Baran

Runner Up: Carolina Quirós Otárola

BEST DRAG PERFORMER

Winner: Lolita Chanel

Runner Up: Shelita Bonet Hoyle

BEST IMPROV TROUPE

Winner: (TIED) Femmeprov CLT

Winner: (TIED) Shameless Society Improv

Runner Up: Breakroom Improv

BEST MAGICIAN

Winner: Jack Kelly

Runner Up: Bryan Saint

BEST MOVIE THEATER

Winner: The Independent Picture House

Runner Up: Cinemark Bistro Charlotte

BEST PERFORMING ARTIST(S)

Winner: Melody Shanahan

Runner Up: Christine McLennan

BEST PLACE TO HEAR SPOKEN WORD

Winner: Petra’s Bar

Runner Up: The Evening Muse

BEST SKETCH COMEDY ROUTINE

Winner: Bummerland Sketch

Runner Up: The Lynns

BEST THEATRE COMPANY

Winner: Charlotte Comedy Theater

Runner Up: Three Bone Theatre

BEST THEATRE SHOW (LOCAL)

Winner: Kudzu: A Story of Belonging

Runner Up: Thoughts of a Colored Man

BEST THEATRE SHOW (NATIONAL)

Winner: Hadestown at Belk Theater

Runner Up: Back to the Future: The Musical at Belk Theater

MUSIC BY VENUE

BEST CONCERT VENUE

Winner: Neighborhood Theatre

Runner Up: The Milestone Club

BEST LOCAL RECORD LABEL

Winner: Self Aware Records

Runner Up: Four Finger Records

BEST LOCAL SHOW OF THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Winner: Thousand Dollar Movie Album Release with The Ben Walkers and Late Bloomer at Petra’s Bar 6/29/24

Runner Up: Modern Moxie Album Release Show with Willa Mae, BrizB, & Aerial By Madison Cox at Snug Harbor 8/31/24

BEST MUSIC FESTIVAL (IN STATE)

Winner: Lovin’ Life Music Fest

Runner Up: Welcome to the Family Fest

BEST MUSIC FESTIVAL (OUT OF STATE)

Winner: Lollapalooza

Runner Up: Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival

BEST MUSIC SCHOOL/LESSONS

Winner: School of Rock Charlotte

Runner Up: We Rock Charlotte

BEST NATIONAL SHOW OF THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Winner: Green Day at PNC Music Pavilion 8/26/24

Runner Up: Megan Thee Stallion at PNC Music

Pavilion 7/3/24

BEST OPEN MIC NIGHT

Winner: The Evening Muse

Runner Up: Common Market South End

BEST PLACE TO HEAR COUNTRY MUSIC

Winner: Coyote Joe’s

Runner Up: Thirsty Beaver Saloon

BEST PLACE TO HEAR JAZZ

Winner: Middle C Jazz

Runner Up: Petra’s Bar

BEST RECORDING STUDIO

Winner: Sioux Sioux Studio

Runner Up: Old House Studio

MUSIC BY ARTIST(S)

BEST ALTERNATIVE/PUNK BAND

Winner: Thousand Dollar Movie

Runner Up: Hey RICHARD

BEST BLUES/JAZZ/SOUL BAND

Winner: Cosmic Collective

Runner Up: The Bleus

BEST COUNTRY/FOLK BAND

Winner: Sinners & Saints

Runner Up: Wes and The Railroaders

BEST DJ

Winner: That Guy Smitty

Runner Up: DJ Fannie Mae

BEST ELECTRONIC/POP

Winner: Natalie Carr

Runner Up: Girl Brutal

BEST EXPERIMENTAL MUSICIAN/BAND

Winner: Girl Brutal

Runner Up: Bravo Pueblo

BEST INDIE-ROCK BAND

Winner: Modern Moxie

Runner Up: Thousand Dollar Movie

BEST LIVE PERFORMER(S)

Winner: Christine McLennan

Runner Up: Once Below Joy

BEST LOCAL ALBUM

Winner: “Tripping the Light Fantastic”Modern Moxie

Runner Up: “Good Morning, Factory” - Jackson Fig

BEST NEW BAND

Winner: Girl Brutal

Runner Up: Bravo Pueblo

BEST POTENTIAL BREAKOUT ARTIST

Winner: MoonLander

Runner Up: Thousand Dollar Movie

BEST PRODUCER

Winner: Leonardo Solis

Runner Up: Franky Dynamite

BEST R&B SINGER

Winner: Dexter Jordan

Runner Up: Neveah

BEST RAPPER

Winner: Phaze Gawd

Runner Up: Elevator Jay

BEST SOLO PERFORMER

Winner: Melody Shanahan

Runner Up: Christine McLennan

BEST SINGER/SONGWRITER

Winner: Natalie Carr

Runner Up: Lisa De Novo

CRITICS’ PICKS: NIGHTLIFE

If there’s one thing we’ve done our research on, it’s where to have a good time in this town. We’re more than happy to share what we’ve found.

BEST NEW NIGHTLIFE SPOT: Sneak

Tucked in the back of the Pecan Point shopping center at the corner of East 7th Street and Pecan Avenue in Elizabeth, next to longtime tenant Bang Bang Burgers, now stands a new kid on the block. What started as a deli bar concept, according to coowner Jamil Whitlow, evolved into a high-energy, speakeasy-style lounge smartly dubbed Sneak. No, this is not an in-person version Ashley Madison made solely for sneaky links. As Whitlow described to us in May, the name was a play on the speakeasy, which has become somewhat of a misused term in Charlotte nightlife, with new establishments popping up all the time and advertising themselves as such.

“We‘re not a speakeasy, we‘re a sneakeasy,” he explained. “A speakeasy is historically a hard place to find and if you do find [it], you gotta know someone that knows somebody to get there. Our place is not hard to find, but the concept itself is in the location off the beaten path that you‘re not anticipating for it to be.”

Inside, soft touches of vibrant wall treatments, gold accents and tasteful lighting contrast the masculine hues of brown leather and moody accents, creating a cozy destination that visually appeals to everyone and feels bigger than it is — the perfect setup for the DJs or jazz musicians who set up there on weekends.

We suggest the Sneaky Link, with Lyre‘s Blanco, Seedlip agave, Lyre‘s orange sec, and Guajillo árbol agave; or the Don‘t Shy Away with Teremana Reposado, Cointreau, spicy oleo and carrot sour.

BEST OWNERSHIP GROUP: Best Bars

In the early aughts, when Tommy Timmins came together with current partners Maynard Goble and Kevin Devin, the trio began referring to their group as Best Bars for marketing purposes. Google was rapidly rising to popularity as America’s favorite search engine and the guys figured they wanted their businesses to show up when folks searched for “best bars in Charlotte.”

It gave a glimpse at a certain knack for marketing that placed the Best Bars team ahead

of the curve from its very beginnings 25 years ago. The team responsible for popular establishments including The Workman’s Friend, Connolly’s on Fifth, Prohibition, The Daily, Tyber Creek Pub and Dandelion Market have had a rough year. In March, Tyber Creek Pub closed its doors at the corner of South Boulevard and Tremont Avenue for the last time after 25 years due to redevelopment of the property that had been slated since 2021. Then in July, the team shut down Dandelion Market, the longtime late-night staple on West 5th Street in Uptown, after nearly 15 years in business due to rent hikes.

The trio was far from dejected. Having closed on a new property on South Mint Street in February, they’ve been busy bringing the buildings there up to par for the return of Tyber Creek Pub. With future plans for a new Dandelion Market location also in the works, they purchased the former Soul Gastrolounge food truck to turn it into a Dandelion Market truck that will serve favorites from that menu at the new Tyber Creek site. With all these exciting new projects in motion, the team remains optimistic about the state of Best Bars amidst Charlotte’s rapid growth. Still, they yearn for the days when they had the time to come up with new ideas rather than salvage the old ones.

“We want to be bored again; we like being bored because that’s when creativity happens,” Timmins told me. “We’ve been playing Whac-A-Mole for the last five years.” Whether they enjoy playing Whac-A-

Mole or not, the good news is they’ve got the high score.

BEST FOR FUN & GAMES: Slingshot CLT

Tired of just eating, drinking and standing around when you go out? You’ll have to brave the parking in South End for this one, but it’s worth it, if only just to play the “World’s Largest Pac-Man.”

Located next to Resident Culture on West Bland Street, Slingshot is a social game club marketed as a place that stresses social interaction over social media. Here you can put your phone away, forget about the adult stresses in your life and bring out your inner child by playing arcade games, duckpin bowling and Skee-Ball.

Some standout games include air hockey, racing games, Jurassic Park VR, and Space Invaders. They also have classic table games like Guess Who?, Sorry!, Yahtzee! and Jenga.

Plus there’s food like wings, flatbreads, handhelds and bar bites; more than 40 beers, seltzers and wines on tap; and live music and DJs. Stop by during the week for karaoke and half-price game days.

BEST COCKTAIL BAR: Elsewhere

You don’t have to go far to go elsewhere after Slingshot — just make a night of it in South End.

Nightlife Critics’ Picks

Tucked under The Design Center water tour on West Worthington Avenue, Elsewhere is a cozy and intimate bar offering a rotating selection of travelinspired cocktails.

The space requires a $10/year membership for access to their impressive drink menu, which is always changing. Its fall 2024 drink menu featured five creations including Autumn in New York (Wild Turkey 101, St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram, super lemon juice, simple syrup, Cabernet Sauvignon float), and Oaxaca? I Barely Knew Her (Espolòn Blanco tequila, aperol, super grapefruit juice, super lime juice, red bell pepper, jalapeño, tajin, and dehydrated grapefruit wheel).

They also have classic cocktails like the negroni and old fashioned, plus wine, beer and an array of non-alcoholic options like Midwestern Vibes (spiritless Kentucky 74, muddled orange, muddled cherry, molasses, Mexican Sprite).

BEST COCKTAIL BAR WITH A CONCEPT: Lorem Ipsum

Plaza-Midwood holds many of Charlotte’s crown jewels when it comes to the city’s music scene. One of the newest, which is celebrating its first birthday in November, is the Lorem Ipsum listening bar, a place for music and conversation, built to give guests a full sensory experience.

Located inside Hotel Refuge, next to Mexican cuisine staple La Autentica, Lorem Ipsum technically sits in Belmont, just at the corner of Plaza Midwood closest to Uptown. Guests of the small room venue travel through the overarching hotel space to get to Ipsum’s sanctum, decorated by soulful art pieces strewn along the walls, curated by local visual artist Victor Rustin.

Each week, the space is curated nightly by local DJ mainstays like Simon SMTHNG, sometimes bringing in international guests like King Iven to spin. Along with the sounds, a range of different events elevate the spot, including gallery nights and screenings, and the impressive selection of cocktails and spiritless drinks curated by the owner, renowned mixologist Justin Hazelton, can’t be overlooked.

BEST MIXOLOGIST: Amanda Britton

When ARDR Hospitality Group announced the imminent opening of MAS Mexican Restaurant in Wesley Heights in February, a press release stated that ARDR bar program manager Amanda Britton would be running the MAS beverage program,

having already created “the most highly curated, specialized spirits collection in Charlotte.”

But that’s a press release, of course it’s going to lay it on thick, right? Longtime fans of Britton knew it probably wasn’t hype, and it took just one visit to confirm.

With a cocktail menu that centered mezcal and tequila options as well as nonalcoholic alternatives that were just as impeccable, Britton only bolstered the reputation she had built at other ARDR establishments like Bardo, VANA, Lincoln Street Kitchen and Cocktails and its pocket bar The Green Room.

“The opportunity to travel to Mexico for hands-on learning has been instrumental in the conceptualization and curation of our offerings for MAS,” Britton said upon announcing the restaurant’s opening. “We are bringing in new spirits that have never been served in Charlotte. I can’t wait to share that with Charlotte.”

In September, it was announced that Britton was no longer with ARDR and would be heading up bar operations at Sam Hart’s new venture, Restaurant Sphagett. Exciting news, as Hart can’t go wrong with Britton in the mix.

BEST HIRE: Kayleigh Williams-Brown

When news broke in September of El Thrifty Social’s abrupt closure in Optimist Hall, true cocktail connoisseurs had one thought in mind: Where will Kayleigh Williams-Brown end up?

The talented mixologist had built a name for herself at El Thrifty as well as former jobs as bar manager at the critically acclaimed Leah & Louise and before then at The Royal Tot, recognized as Best Mixologist in our 2022 Best in the Nest issue. So it was no surprise when, just days after El Thrifty shut its doors, Built On Hospitality announced the addition of Williams-Brown to lead the opening team of Chief’s Modern Cocktail Parlor, NoDa’s newest cocktail bar from Bob Peters, which opened in the fall.

“Crafting cocktails allows me to express my creative ideas and art,” Williams-Brown said. “I’m proud to join Built On Hospitality at Chief’s this fall and craft an elevated experience built around distinctive and inventive drinks.”

Any cocktail bar with Bob Peters’ name attached was going to garner attention regardless, but bringing on a pro like Williams-Brown to spearhead the operation only leveled-up an already highly anticipated opening.

BEST WINE BAR: Substrate

Charlotte needed a Substrate — a place to drink that doesn’t feel like the Charlotte drinking scene we’ve known. It’s got a lineup of vinyl, bottles of natural wine, spendy vermouth, hipster bartenders telling the girlypops what orange wine is, and then the girlypops telling their girlypops what orange wine is. The wine is experimental relative to the landscape of Charlotte — there’s often not your typical pinot noir on the glass list — or any list. (Gasp!) This is why it deserves a proper nod. Even though some classic wine people might scoff, that doesn’t really matter because Substrate on a Friday or Saturday is packed. Local musicians groove on the front patio while guests stand, sit, wander around, flirt, drink Spaghetts, etc.

Inside, the dark walls contrast with disco ball light, small tables are studded with built-in chess boards, and several nooks and crannies become wine-stained, hot goss hangouts. Outside, it’s a patio party. People bring their bottles and spill out onto the porch and the grassy area with picnic tables like it’s the last thing they’ll do. Wednesday nights offer a rotating complimentary wine tasting, too, which is delicious, social, makes new styles of wine more accessible for those wanting to learn and, most importantly, free!

BEST PLACE TO DAY DRINK: Rosemont

Rosemont is one of those rare restaurants that are open all day, everyday — well, 11 a.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. on weekends. Mid-day, you’ll find anyone from stay-at-home moms and real-estate dads to nearby food industry workers and the nursing staff from the hospital drinking a bottle of Chenin or Pinot. Rosemont’s food menu is crowd-pleasing, but its wine menu, specifically the bottle list, will widen the eyes of drinkers with an eager palate. A glass at the bar is the way to go for solo sippers, and a bottle for the table at one of Rosemont’s comfy booths is best for groups. Or just take the drinking outside on the leisurely, stringlit patio overlooking the Elizabeth neighborhood, where guests make day-drinking look good and classy.

As for what they’re drinking, it’s usually espresso martinis and/or bubbles. Rosemont’s bartenders shake up one of the best espresso martinis in town and the Bubbles & Frites weekday special from 4 to 6 is for. the. people: endless herby shoestring fries with a purchase of a bottle of bubbly (or any wine over $50). In the cooler months, there are fire pits and heat lamps to keep the patio cozy as can be.

BEST PLACE TO BAR HOP: NoDa

NoDa has been a place for a proper hop and crawl for decades. It actually gained its identity as being a place to bop into different galleries along North Davidson Street in the ’90s — the storied gallery crawl nights of that era are notorious. Today, though more of an entertainment district than an arts district, the crawl sentiment remains. People hop, walk, pop in and stumble their way from bar to bar in this still-tinkering-on-edgy area. This bar crawl is ever-so-walkable which is ever-so-rare in Charlotte. If you’re dedicating an evening to it, you can start at a natural wine bar and finish at a divey karaoke bar that may come with hangxiety the next morning. It may look a little something like this: look cute and share a bottle of natural wine and savory, stinky (the good kind) cheese with friends at Bar a Vins, cap the wine off with a clever surprise of a cocktail from Idlewild, then get a little less classy and little more rowdy at Billy Jack’s Shack, and then get a little rowdier at JackBeagle’s and run into an old pal or a Hinge date. Finish the night at dive-ish bar The Ugly for fernet and some photobooth time, or a game of pool at Sanctuary. Throw an oyster shot from Growler’s Pourhouse in there somewhere. The possibilities are endless.

BEST SPIRIT SELECTION: Dot Dot Dot

Sometimes, what’s new is old and what’s old is new again. And by old, we mean 2017. But really, we mean the timelessness of a classic cocktail lounge. Stefan Huebner took his eclectic experience as a longtime hospital vet, a butcher, a baker, a culinary school graduate and, of course, a bartender to build out this warm, transcendental time warp of a bar. Guests are led by a host to their seat through a long, narrow hallway — a sort of liminal, anticipatory space. The lounge is windowless to eliminate the risk of someone knowing what time it is. Everything is lavish and red-hued and leathery and shadowy. The cocktail menu is large for a “craft” cocktail bar, but not in a mismatched, overwhelming way. It’s organized into Classics, House and Luxury (which are over $20). The three-month barrel-aged negroni is a fabulous “classic” drink. The Burning Leaves mezcal and green chartreuse cocktail from the House menu will sweep you off your feet. And The Hot Box bourbon drink with chili bitters and pecan wood smoke is one of those Luxury cocktails that drinks like a forbidden kiss. Ask the bartenders about any of the 700 different spirits. They’re eager to get to know guests’ taste and whip up a little something catered to their personal tastes.

Nightlife

Critics’ Picks

BEST PATIO: Dilworth Tasting Room

(Original)

DTR’s OG location in Dilworth is a fan favorite. The back patio is draped in vines, tables tuck into corners and the sweet, trickling koi pond creates a soothing soundscape. Decked out in lively hues of orange and white, the curious koi fish with puckered lips gently splash in the pond creating a tranquil backdrop for boozy conversation and munchies. String lights twinkle as the sun starts to set, and it’s clear why the original location will always hold a charm that’s simply unmatched — a timeless favorite that sets the standard, even as the other two locations carve out their own unique vibes.

The wine doesn’t hurt, either. Even the few front tables at the entrance feel very European, and make for some great people watching. Add a charcuterie board to the mix, and you might just believe you’re somewhere other than Charlotte.

BEST DRINK MENU: Ramble Drinkery

After leaving Humbug, industry vet Larry Suggs has been working on opening a new concept called Jean’s Cold Drink at The Alley at Latta Arcade, but he’s simultaneously been partnering with a few fellow Charlotte bartenders on the “roaming” popup Ramble Drinkery.

The cocktails line the menu from lightest to booziest and tend to involve techniques typically associated with food — sous vide, strain, pickle, infuse, clarify — featuring ingredients you’ll associate with food, too — tamarind, hot sauce, black pepper, pecorino cheese, yogurt. Drinkers are pretty much guaranteed to explore a new, possibly stinging, palate-shifting sensation with just one sip.

We don’t mean to tease, but with a menu that changes frequently, it’s unfair to get your hopes up with specific drink mentions. But, alas, here are some drinks Ramble has made in the past: a clarified pisco, juniper white pepper drink, a bruleed banana with strawberry-cacao vermouth rum cocktail, and a curried pickled mango mezcal martini. The high-level standard demonstrated with these cocktails might just usher in a new era of drinking in Charlotte. Once you’ve tried a pickled or clarified lil’ something, there’s no going back.

BEST ROOFTOP: Merchant & Trade

Merchant & Trade redesigned its 19-story-high rooftop over the summer, leaving the neon pink and floral decor of 2016 in the past. The establishment

turned a page and entered a chapter of sleek, clean, neutral looks. It’s more appealing across-the-board. First, visually. Secondly, with a revamped cocktail and “social snacks” menu. One snack is the Bougie Tots dish — tater tots with truffle crème fraiche, caviar, salmon roe, and furikake. Fun, random, and really, really delicious — because why wouldn’t fried potatoes, supple crème fraiche and briny orbs of roe taste incredible?

As for drinks, they’re genuinely pushing the boundaries of a standard, boozy rooftop bar menu. You won’t find trite, bright pink sugar-dominant cocktails here. There are some high-end bourbon cocktails on the menu, an amaro-and-mezcal drink, and a playful fresh rosemary-and-aperol sipper just to name a few. The cocktail prices are steep, yes, but they do come with a similarly steep view overlooking Romare Bearden Park and Truist Field, looking west for the perfect Carolina sunset.

BEST WAY TO SPEND A SOBER NIGHT: Shameless Improv

People are quick to say that anything fun in Charlotte has to involve alcohol. But, Shameless Improv proves that so wrong. Stimulants and booze simply couldn’t make this fully improvised 90-minute show any better. The small, local troupe of improv comics calls it the Shameless Improv “experience,” because, for the audience, it is much more than consuming run-of-the-mill comedy. It is a whole immersive affair — a high-energy, deeply engaging exchange between audience and performers.

Popping up at breweries and cafes throughout the city (and often on weeknights) attendees can expect several games, short-form improv scenes and mini-performances all in one evening. It’s a bunch of adults doing weird voices, running around the stage, taking other grown adults’ arbitrary suggestions and turning them into a completely improved, onthe-spot show. The games get random, far-fetched and raunchy, but are truly good-natured and tend to make people like other people more by the end of the night.

BEST HIDDEN GEM BAR: The Ugly

The Ugly, Idlewild’s self-proclaimed ugly little sister, opened in November 2023 and has catered to a steady but pretty lowkey crowd for the past year. It’s just past the busy North Davidson Street strip, in the small shopping center with The Chamber at Wooden Robot and Summit Coffee. For the most part, this is a spot for NoDa locals and a post-shift industry watering hole open until 2 a.m. But, it’s

got all the great bar touches — loungey couches, flirty back booths, dark lighting, and (thank god) a photobooth. Hell, they’ll give you a deck of cards to play with if you ask. It’s like a dive, re-defined, a bit younger, slightly less carpeted and grunge.

The menu is small, nothing akin to its fancy older sister cocktail bar. It’s a nice contrast — you can expect Miller High Lifes, a next-level chilled negroni, a lineup of classic amari, bourbon, highballs and a selection of boilermaker specials. Most of these are $10 and under which is so much-welcomed in these parts.

BEST DIVE BAR: Midwood Country Club

It’s tough to call a dive bar the best when what makes it the best is really the worst — shadowy corners, carpets, dartboards, industry people after hours. But at the end of the day, that’s what a true dive bar prides itself on — a little bit of sketch wrapped up in the bow of familiar faces and cheap beer.

At MCC, Midwood Country Club’s more colloquial name, you can get just that. MCC is a low-ceiling hangout a bit down Central, perfect for a nightcap. Darts are serious here, as is pool. The only thing country club about it is the camaraderie — great people kicking back for a great time.

BEST LGBTQ-FRIENDLY EVENT: UltraViolet Sapphic Night at Petra’s

With the decline of brick-and-mortar sites that cater to the lesbian and sapphic scenes, specialized events have become integral to keeping Charlotte’s queer community alive. Petra’s owners Perry Fowler and Marta Suarez del Real were all too aware of that issue, which is why they approached regular Alexx Baerwald Simard with the idea for a regularly scheduled sapphic event in August 2023. Together, they provided an answer to what they thought the community desired. UltraViolet Sapphic Night is a quarterly event held at Petra’s and includes musical entertainment, tarot card readings, sapphic dance offs and more. When we spoke in February, Simard said she is constantly looking for ways to grow and change with the community they serve.

“Culture and language are always evolving,” Simard said. “As does our collective sharing and understanding of identity and the ways in which power and privilege have included some and excluded others. We might not be getting it perfect right now, but I think it’s important to do our best and be open to evolving as we learn and grow, individually and collectively.”

BEST PARTICIPATORY EVENT: Drunk Journaling

While journaling is often thought of as one of the more solitary activities one can undertake, a quiet hobby that involves personal introspection and time alone, local print supply shop Good Postage in Camp North End threw all of that out the window with its popular monthly event: Drunk Journaling. Good Postage created a unique space for collaboration and chatter with Drunk Journaling, which marked its one-year anniversary back in July. According to Good Postage co-owner Jane Manfredi, who opened the store with her mother Karen in 2020, the popular event struck a chord with people who have been more than ready to share space while taking part in an activity that’s usually done alone.

“We usually see a lot of our regulars coming together to kind of geek out about how they use their journals,” Manfredi told Queen City Nerve. “We always usually have a couple of new people, which is exciting because we get to talk to them and kind of show them what we do. But I really just every month hope to see the community get together and enjoy each other.”

And don’t be fooled by the name, drinking is far from mandatory. In fact, when we dropped in for the June event, only half of those in attendance were partaking in alcohol. So while the name is fun, the vibes are more wholesome chill sesh than intoxicated debauchery.

BEST COMEBACK: The Daily

The Daily opened in late 2017 in the former Stool Pigeons space under the ownership of Best Bars Charlotte and quickly became a regular stop for weekend bar hopping in Fourth Ward. But it wasn’t until we couldn’t pop in for one or two following its COVID-era closure that we realized how much the corner hangout had become a staple for the Uptown scene. Then in fall 2023, The Daily announced on socials, “We’re thrilled to reintroduce ourselves as the exclusive new space in Uptown Charlotte for all things events and celebrations.” It wasn’t the announcement we had hoped for, but it was a start. Fast forward to August 2024, and whispers of The Daily being back for real, for real, started to seep out. We checked Instagram, and sure enough, the first post, shared weeks prior, “WE ARE OPEN” in big, bold letters. Upon our first visit, the bar was full and the open-air sunroom lined with twinkling string lights promised a cozy backdrop for our 20-person party. This was The Daily we remembered. Throw in two pool tables and a pinball machine and we (they) are so back.

INFO@QCNERVE.COM

Nightlife

READERS’ Picks

TO DANCE

BEST CLUB DJ

Winner: DJ That Guy Smitty

Runner Up: DJ Spider

BEST DANCE CLUB

Winner: Snug Harbor

Runner Up: Trio Charlotte

BEST KARAOKE

Winner: Jeff’s Bucket Shop

Runner Up: Bone Snugs n Harmony at Snug Harbor

TO KICK IT

BEST ARCADE BAR

Winner: Super Abari Game Bar

Runner Up: Pins Mechanical Co

BEST BOWLING ALLEY

Winner: Bowlero 10 Park

Runner Up: Queen Park Social

BEST CIGAR BAR

Winner: Havana Smoke & Reserve

Runner Up: The Vintage Whiskey & Cigar Bar

BEST COCKTAIL BAR

Winner: Idlewild

Runner Up: Dot Dot Dot

BEST DIVE BAR

Winner: Thirsty Beaver Saloon

Runner Up: Hattie’s Tap & Tavern

BEST DOG BAR

Winner: Skiptown

Runner Up: The Dog Bar

BEST HOOKAH BAR

Winner: Crave Dessert Bar

Runner Up: The Imperial

BEST INSTAGRAMMABLE SPOT

Winner: Camp North End

Runner Up: Aura Rooftop

BEST MUSIC BINGO NIGHT

Winner: Thursdays at Caswell Station

Runner Up: Mondays at Big Al’s Pub & Grubberia

BEST NEIGHBORHOOD BAR

Winner: Tommy’s Pub

Runner Up: The Workman’s Friend

BEST POOL HALL

Winner: Midwood Country Club

Runner Up: JukeBox Pub

BEST SPORTS BAR

Winner: Ed’s Tavern

Runner Up: Thomas Street Tavern

BEST STRIP CLUB

Winner: The Gentlemen’s Club

Runner Up: Chasers

BEST TRIVIA NIGHT

Winner: Mondays with Mindless Minutia Trivia

at Birdsong Brewing Co.

Runner Up: Wednesdays with Mindless Minutia

Trivia at Resident Culture Plaza Midwood

BEST WINE BAR

Winner: Rosie’s Coffee & Wine Garden

Runner Up: Foxcroft Wine Co.

TO PARTY

BEST ANNUAL PARTY

Winner: Charlotte Pride Festival & Parade

Runner Up: SHIPROCKED! Pride Party

BEST NEW NIGHTCLUB

Winner: Trio Charlotte

Runner Up: The Scorpio

BEST PLACE TO GRAB A QUICK DRINK

Winner: The Workman’s Friend

Runner Up: Tommy’s Pub

BEST SINGLES BAR

Winner: Aura Rooftop

Runner Up: Super Abari Game Bar

BEST WEEKLY NIGHTLIFE EVENT

Winner: Bone Snugs n Harmony at Snug Harbor

Runner Up: Wednesday Night Trivia at Resident Culture Plaza Midwood

FOR THE PEOPLE

BEST BAR TO MAKE A NEW FRIEND

Winner: Petra’s Bar

Runner Up: Super Abari Game Bar

BEST BAR TO PEOPLE-WATCH

Winner: Common Market

Runner Up: Snug Harbor

BEST BARTENDER

Winner: Chris Burns - Snug Harbor

Runner Up: Josh Brice - Two Buck Saloon

BEST KARAOKE HOST

Winner: DJ Magick Mike

Runner Up: Jonathan Moore

BEST LGBTQ-FRIENDLY BAR

Winner: Petra’s Bar

Runner Up: Hattie’s Tap & Tavern

BEST MIXOLOGIST

Winner: Jeremy Smith

Runner Up: Amanda Britton

BEST PLACE FOR A FIRST DATE

Winner: The Artisan’s Palate

Runner Up: Super Abari Game Bar

BEST TRIVIA HOST

Winner: Dave Chase

Runner Up: Splash Jordan

BY NEIGHBORHOOD BARS

BEST BALLANTYNE BAR

Winner: Bradshaw Social House

Runner Up: The Olde Mecklenburg Restaurant & Biergarten at Ballantyne

BEST BELMONT BAR

Winner: The Jailhouse Whiskey & Cigar Bar

Runner Up: The Bearded Buffalo Sports Bar

BEST EAST CHARLOTTE BAR

Winner: Smokey Joe’s Cafe

Runner Up: Tommy’s Pub

BEST MATTHEWS/MINT HILL BAR

Winner: Stooges Pub & Grub

Runner Up: Seaboard Brewing, Taproom & Wine Bar

BEST NODA BAR

Winner: JackBeagle’s

Runner Up: Salud Cerveceria

BEST NORTH MECKLENBURG BAR

(HUNTERSVILLE, CORNELIUS, DAVIDSON)

Winner: Old Town Public House

Runner Up: Kindred

BEST PINEVILLE BAR

Winner: OpenTap

Runner Up: Middle James Brewing Company

BEST PLAZA MIDWOOD BAR

Winner: Snug Harbor

Runner Up: The Workman’s Friend

BEST SOUTH END BAR

Winner: Small Bar

Runner Up: VINYL

BEST SOUTHPARK BAR

Winner: Legion Brewing

Runner Up: BAR ONE Lounge

BEST STEELE CREEK BAR

Winner: The Casual Pint of Rivergate

Runner Up: OneSixty Cocktails & Kitchen Lounge

BEST UNIVERSITY CITY BAR

Winner: Flying Saucer Draught Emporium

Runner Up: Picasso’s Sports Café

BEST UPTOWN BAR

Winner: Connolly’s On Fifth

Runner Up: Rí Rá Irish Pub

BEST WEST CHARLOTTE BAR

Winner: Pinky’s Westside Grill

Runner Up: The Milestone Club

LIFESTYLE

A FAREWELL (FOR NOW)

A sincere note from our not-so-phantom publisher

BY JUSTIN LAFRANCOIS

If you’re familiar with the story behind Queen City Nerve, you know that phantom publishing played a role in the demise of Creative Loafing Charlotte back in 2018, which led to the launch of this paper. On Halloween of that year, a Greensboro-based publisher walked in, gave the entire staff five minutes to pack their things, then shut down the office. That day, Charlotte lost an integral voice in independent news and culture.

Just 25 years old, I had no idea what I would do next, though I knew I was passionate enough to learn everything I could about the print news industry to carry on a legacy of fearless, truthful journalism — something the city of Charlotte desperately needed. I wanted to be a part of something that would stand as a beacon for what a free press truly means to a community.

When I called my former coworker Ryan Pitkin, who would become co-founder and editor-in-chief of Queen City Nerve, two days after the 2018 layoff to tell him I was all in on starting the city’s new alt-weekly, I said I would only move forward if he was all in with me. I knew this was something Ryan and I were destined to do together — and if you know us personally, you know it too.

Over the last six years, we’ve built Queen City Nerve into a reputable source for coverage of news, arts, culture, music and more. We’ve dug deep into our community,

cultivated sources, corrected our journalism policies when needed, and remained steadfast in telling stories that the mainstream media often ignores. We’ve been awardwinning and nationally recognized for a variety of topics, strategies and stories.

Not to boast, but I truly believe Ryan and I are among the most passionate people you’ll ever meet when it comes to doing this job and identifying what really matters to people in our community and sharing those stories.

We could have easily taken the safe route, going our separate ways and taking stable jobs that actually paid well, avoiding the challenges we faced. But instead, we chose to invest all of ourselves into this business — even when we weren’t drawing regular pay for the first five years.

It was thankless work at times. We endured ridicule from anonymous online critics, fielded complaints over every typo, and struggled to keep the lights on while juggling odd jobs just to pay our bills. But we’ve always remained committed to our craft, operating with integrity, truthfulness and transparency.

I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished here. Collaborating with local historian Pamela Grundy to produce Legacy: Three Centuries of Black History in Charlotte is a highlight, as was covering the 2020 protests

that arose from the police murder of George Floyd; creating a safe space for LGBTQ folks through six years of Eat, Gay, Love; and challenging powerful figures who perpetuate injustice in our city. We’ve navigated litigation threats, built a sustainable business, and done work that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

Charlotte has been my home for 20 years, and I owe so much to this city. I’ve grown here, experienced love, loss, growth, and perspective — things only a small, newSouth city like Charlotte can offer. It’s been a privilege to be a part of the community in such a meaningful way.

I’ve worked nonstop since I was old enough to do so, pouring my heart into work and then this business for six years. Never in my wildest dreams did I think we’d make it this far, but now I know we can go as far as we want.

For me and Ryan, this is more than a job; it’s our life’s work. Our blood runs through this business and in every word we put out. We have an incredible team that helps us meet our mission every day. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to take the next step in my life.

With the release of our sixth annual Best in the Nest issue on Nov. 20, I’m announcing that I will be relocating outside of Charlotte and the state of North Carolina. This is completely out of character for me, as I’ve always been someone who thrives on routine, structure, community and being rooted.

But I’ve reached a point where I need to grow and evolve, to find myself, and to ensure that I am bringing my best self to the future of this business. This is a personal decision, but it’s one I believe will benefit the paper in the long run.

Why share all of this? Why be so open about a decision that may seem unrelated to our readers? Because transparency is key. In independent media, ownership must be tied to the community it serves.

Our founding story — one born from the ashes of a phantom publishing fire — is an example of why we can’t afford to lose local voices. Corporate and outside ownership has already harmed access to vital information in communities across the country, and we’re committed to preventing that here.

While I may be moving away physically, I remain fully committed to Queen City Nerve’s success. I will continue to guide the vision of the paper, and I’ll be fully involved in the business and development side of things. Our editorial team, which is still based in Charlotte, will continue to provide the same trusted, independent journalism you’ve come to expect. Nothing will change in that regard.

We have so much work ahead of us, especially over the next four years. As we move forward with federal policies under our new administration, we’ll remain focused on issues that matter deeply to our community: immigrant rights, reproductive health, housing justice, criminal reform, mass incarceration, and so much more.

We’ll continue to work with experts, activists, and community leaders who have been fighting these battles for years — especially through the challenges of the outgoing federal administration. This work is constant and ever-evolving, and we will remain on the frontlines of it.

If you’re a friend or someone close to me and I haven’t had the chance to say a personal goodbye, know that I cherish our connection. You’ve made an impact on my life, just as I hope I’ve made one on yours.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for your trust and support over the years. As I take this next step in my life, I want you to know that Queen City Nerve’s mission will continue. We’re more determined than ever to serve this city with honest, independent journalism. I look forward to seeing where the next chapter takes us — together. JLAFRANCOIS@QCNERVE.COM

LIFESTYLE PUZZLES

SUDOKU

BY LINDA THISTLE

TRIVIA TEST

BY FIFI RODRIGUEZ

1. MOVIES: What is the name of the necklace that Rose throws into the sea at the end of “Titanic”?

2. GEOGRAPHY: Where was the ancient city of Carthage located?

3. TELEVISION: What are the names of the FBI agents on “The X-Files”?

4. LITERATURE: Who wrote the short story “The Gift of the Magi”?

5. HISTORY: When was the United Nations organization created?

6. SCIENCE: What is the addictive substance in tobacco?

7. U.S. PRESIDENTS: Which president signed into law the Sherman Antitrust Act?

8. CHEMISTRY: What is the lightest of metallic elements?

CROSSWORD

PLACE A NUMBER IN THE EMPTY BOXES IN SUCH A WAY THAT EACH ROW ACROSS, EACH COLUMN DOWN AND EACH SMALL 9-BOX SQUARE CONTAINS ALL OF THE NUMBERS ONE TO NINE.

9. MYTHOLOGY: What is the name of the half-man, half-bull creature that inhabits the Labyrinth?

10. FOOD & DRINK: What is challah?

©2024 King Feautres Syndicate, Inc. All rights reserved.

©2024 King Feautres Syndicate, Inc. All rights reserved.

HOROSCOPE

NOV 20 - NOV 26 NOV 27 - DEC 3

ARIES (March 21 to April 19) A long-sought workplace change could be happening soon. Consider reworking your ideas and preparing a presentation just in case. Meanwhile, a personal relationship takes a new turn.

TAURUS (April 20 to May 20) Your persuasiveness doesn’t really start to kick in until midweek. By then, you can count on having more supporters in your camp, including some who you doubted would ever join you.

GEMINI (May 21 to June 20) Your workload is still high, but good news! You should start to see the daylight by the week’s end. Reserve the weekend for fun and games with friends and loved ones. You deserve it!

CANCER (June 21 to July 22) Regardless of how frustrating things are, keep that “Crab” under control. A cutting comment you might think is apt right now will leave others hurting for a long time to come.

LEO (July 23 to August 22) Be more sensitive to the emotions of loved ones who might feel left out while you’re stalking a new opportunity. Be sure to make it up to them this weekend. A nice surprise could be waiting.

VIRGO (August 23 to September 22) The gregarious Virgo rarely has a problem making new friends. But repairing frayed relationships doesn’t come easily. Still, if it’s what you want to do, you’ll find a way. Good luck!

LIBRA (September 23 to October 22) A misunderstanding with a partner or spouse needs to be worked out before it turns into something really nasty. Forget about your pride for now and make the first healing move.

SCORPIO (October 23 to November 21) Communication dominates the week. Work out any misunderstandings with co-workers. Also, get back in touch with old friends and those family members you rarely see.

SAGITTARIUS (November 22 to December 21) As busy as your week is, make time for someone who feels shut out of your life. Your act of kindness could later prove to be more significant than you might have realized.

CAPRICORN (December 22 to January 19) Congratulations! Your busy workweek leads to some very satisfying results. Sports and sporting events are high on your weekend activities aspect. Enjoy them with family and friends.

AQUARIUS (January 20 to February 18) Your generosity of spirit reaches out once again to someone who needs reassurance. There might be problems, but keeping this line of communication open eventually pays off.

PISCES (February 19 to March 20) You are among the truth-seekers in the universe, so don’t be surprised to find yourself caught up in a new pursuit of facts to counter what you believe is an insidious exercise in lying.

BORN THIS WEEK: You believe in loyalty and in keeping secrets. All things considered, you would probably make a perfect secret agent.

ARIES (March 21 to April 19) Try to be patient as a troubling matter at work is dealt with a step at a time. Progress toward a resolution might seem slow, but it’s sure and steady.

TAURUS (April 20 to May 20) Be careful not to let misplaced loyalty to a friend cloud your usually good judgment. Be true to your principles -- they won’t ever let you down.

GEMINI (May 21 to June 20) A seeming inability to make a decision can sometimes work to your advantage. Use the time to reassess the situation, then act on the facts you uncover.

CANCER (June 21 to July 22) Good news! A personal matter you thought would never improve suddenly takes on a more positive aspect. Things brighten up at your workplace as well.

LEO (July 23 to August 22) Don’t huddle alone in your den to nurse those hurt feelings. Instead, get out and enjoy the company of family and friends. Remember, lions thrive in a pride!

VIRGO (August 23 to September 22) An old health problem recurs, but quick attention soon puts everything right. Meanwhile, plans for the upcoming holidays might need to be changed. Stay flexible!

LIBRA (September 23 to October 22) A project you started earlier this year begins to be noticed by the “right people.” Expect to get some heartening news by year’s end!

SCORPIO (October 23 to November 21) It’s relationship repair time for both single and married Scorpions. Patch up the weak spots and renew your commitment to your partner or spouse.

SAGITTARIUS (November 22 to December 21) Love and marriage aspects are strong for both paired and single Archers. The latter can expect romantic overtures from a loving Leo.

CAPRICORN (December 22 to January 19) Expect news about a business deal you weren’t sure about. In your personal life, a dispute with your spouse or partner is soon cleared up.

AQUARIUS (January 20 to February 18) You have a tendency to overdo it, especially at this time of the year. Ease up on those grand plans for the holidays and take more time for yourself.

PISCES (February 19 to March 20) Someone from your romantic past might want to renew your old relationship. While this might be what you were hoping for, weigh your decision carefully.

BORN THIS WEEK: You have a strong sense of truth and duty. You love to learn, and you love to teach. You make friends slowly, but your friendships last.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20

ROCK/PUNK/METAL

Michigander w/ Cece Coakley (Amos’ Southend)

Auroras Hope w/ Caelifera, The Abstractica, Camisole (The Milestone)

Violent Life Violent Death w/ Reviler, Navtec, Bridgeburner (Snug Harbor)

JAZZ/BLUES

Jazz Nights at Canteen (Camp North End)

Jontavious Willis (Stage Door Theater)

COUNTRY/FOLK/AMERICANA

Bonnie Raitt (Ovens Auditorium)

JAZZ/BLUES

Sam Greenfield (Evening Muse)

Leon Thomas (The Underground)

SINGER-SONGWRITER/ACOUSTIC

Josh Daniel, Jim Brock & Kerry Brooks (Smokey Joe’s Cafe & Bar)

CHRISTIAN/GOSPEL/RELIGIOUS

Abbie Gamboa (Neighborhood Theatre)

COVER BANDS

Meet Loaf (Middle C Jazz)

OPEN MIC

Open Mic Night (Goldie’s)

Singer/Songwriter Open Mic (The Rooster) Open Hearts Open Mic (Starlight on 22nd)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21

ROCK/PUNK/METAL

Kevin & the Bikes w/ Main Era, Wiring, Troubleshoot (The Milestone)

Dogma (Neighborhood Theatre)

POP/DANCE/ELECTRONIC/DJ

Drook w/ Default Modes, True Lilith (Snug Harbor) COUNTRY/FOLK/AMERICANA

96.9 The KAT Rising Stars (Coyote Joe’s)

SINGER-SONGWRITER/ACOUSTIC

Caleb Davis (Goldie’s)

JAZZ/BLUES

Boris and Cleophus (Evening Muse)

John Splithoff (Middle C Jazz)

FUNK/JAM BANDS

Shana Blake’s Musical Menagerie (Smokey Joe’s Cafe & Bar)

MIXED-GENRE/EXPERIMENTAL/FESTIVAL

CLT Sound Sessions: Tracei, Tymain Robbins, Eastside Brotha (Petra’s)

COVER BANDS

Lauren Jade (Gladys Knight tribute) (Stage Door Theater)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22

ROCK/PUNK/METAL

Bearings w/ Broadside, Unwell, Stateside (Amos’ Southend)

The Great Indoors w/ It’s Snakes (Camp North End) Lenny Federal Band (Comet Grill)

Wastoid w/ Kenmujo, Appalucia, Stinkbuggg (The Milestone)

Once Below Joy w/ The Phantom Friends, Tiny City, Audio-Reck (Snug Harbor)

COUNTRY/FOLK/AMERICANA

Corey Kent w/ Max McNown (Coyote Joe’s)

Seth Walker w/ Noah Guthrie (Evening Muse)

Ryan Perry w/ Carolina Clay (The Rooster)

Odie Leigh w/ Angela Autumn (Visulite Theatre)

HIP-HOP/SOUL/R&B

Juvenile (The Fillmore)

FUNK/JAM BANDS

Reckless Betty (Smokey Joe’s Cafe & Bar)

JAZZ/BLUES

Richard Elliot (Middle C Jazz)

JazzArts Alumni Weekend (Stage Door Theater)

CLASSICAL/INSTRUMENTAL

Charlotte Symphony: Brahm’s ‘A German Requiem’ (Belk Theater)

CHRISTIAN/GOSPEL/RELIGIOUS

Sixpence None the Richer (Neighborhood Theatre)

COVER BANDS

Swingin’ Richards w/ Hutcheson Brothers (Goldie’s)

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23

ROCK/PUNK/METAL

Four Year Strong (Amos’ Southend)

Mel Bryant & The Mercy Makers w/ Jack the Underdog (Evening Muse)

W.A.S.P. (The Fillmore)

Encre Noire w/ Fault Union, SWAE, Caught Off Guard, Dakota Groves (The Milestone)

Twen & Eric Slick w/ Monsoon (Snug Harbor) POP/DANCE/ELECTRONIC/DJ

Breaksgiving at CUE (Blackbox Theater)

Ultraviolet Sapphic Dance Party (Petra’s) Kids and their Computers w/ Peoplewire Collective, Warp Street (Starlight on 22nd)

JAZZ/BLUES

Richard Elliot (Middle C Jazz)

Bobby Thomas Jazz Trio (Primal Brewery)

JazzArts Alumni Weekend (Stage Door Theater)

FUNK/JAM BANDS

Ben Gatlin Band (Smokey Joe’s Cafe & Bar) COUNTRY/FOLK/AMERICANA

Liz Longley (Evening Muse)

Stephen Wilson Jr. (The Underground)

CLASSICAL/INSTRUMENTAL

Charlotte Symphony Youth Orchestras Fall Concert (Belk Theater)

Charlotte Symphony: Brahm’s ‘A German Requiem’ (Belk Theater) COVER BANDS

Groove Machine w/ Simple Sole Duo (Goldie’s)

Sugar! (System of a Down tribute) w/ Saint Diablo, Awesome Ray Ray (The Rooster)

Jeremy’s Ten (Pearl Jam tribute) (Visulite Theatre)

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24

ROCK/PUNK/METAL

Whitsett w/ Never Home, Dear Kavalier (The Milestone)

Jackopierce (Neighborhood Theatre)

POP/DANCE/ELECTRONIC/DJ

Soul Sundays feat. Guy Nowchild (Starlight on 22nd)

COUNTRY/FOLK/AMERICANA

Mipso (The Underground) JAZZ/BLUES

Sunday Smooth w/ JD feat. Tiffany Blu (Middle C Jazz)

LATIN/WORLD/REGGAE

Pretty Tied Up (Guns ‘n’ Roses tribute) (The Rooster)

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25

POP/DANCE/ELECTRONIC/DJ

Cytotoxin w/ Cognitive, Necroticgorebeast, Inoculation, Blaakhol (The Milestone) JAZZ/BLUES

The Bill Hanna Legacy Jazz Session (Petra’s) OPEN MIC

Find Your Muse Open Mic feat. Shmuushmuu (Evening Muse)

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26

ROCK/PUNK/METAL

Red Rocking Chair (Comet Grill)

Away With Words w/ Dryrot, Screwed Ends, Nosey Neighbor (The Milestone)

HIP-HOP/SOUL/R&B

Cody Manson (The Rooster)

COUNTRY/FOLK/AMERICANA

Ocie Elliot w/ William Prince (Neighborhood Theatre) OPEN MIC

Open Mic Night feat. The Smokin J’s (Smokey Joe’s Cafe & Bar)

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27

ROCK/PUNK/METAL

The Keith Allen Circus (Neighborhood Theatre) SINGER-SONGWRITER/ACOUSTIC

Josh Daniel, Jim Brock & Kerry Brooks (Smokey Joe’s Cafe & Bar)

COUNTRY/FOLK/AMERICANA

Smokin J’s w/ Ben Gatlin, Pocket Aces(Smokey Joe’s Cafe & Bar)

JAZZ/BLUES

Jazz Nights @ Canteen (Camp North End) Farber & Friends feat. Robyn Springer & Brandon Stevens (Middle C Jazz)

POP/DANCE/ELECTRONIC/DJ

Kany García (The Fillmore)

MIXED-GENRE/EXPERIMENTAL/FESTIVAL

Plaza Midwood’s Annual Suit Night (Snug Harbor) COVER BANDS

Kids in America w/ Ryan Trotti (Goldie’s) OPEN MIC

Singer/Songwriter Open Mic (The Rooster) Open Hearts Open Mic (Starlight on 22nd)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28

FUNK/JAM BANDS

Shana Blake’s Musical Menagerie (Smokey Joe’s Cafe & Bar)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29

ROCK/PUNK/METAL

Weekend Friend w/ Current Blue, Fudge (Amos’ Southend)

The Lenny Federal Band (Comet Grill)

Scarlet House w/ Sweet Spine (Neighborhood Theatre)

COUNTRY/FOLK/AMERICANA

Ellis Paul w/ Rachael Kilgour (Evening Muse) JAZZ/BLUES

Robyn Springer feat. Ziad Rabie & Rodney Shelton (Middle C Jazz)

MIXED-GENRE/EXPERIMENTAL/FESTIVAL

A Fundraiser for Western NC (The Milestone)

HIP-HOP/SOUL/R&B

Lute w/ Tracei, Dexter Jordan, Makeda, VVG, DJ FLLS (Snug Harbor)

HOLIDAY

The Strong Queens: Holiday Candelight Concert (Booth Playhouse)

SINGER-SONGWRITER/ACOUSTIC

Garrett Huffman Band w/ Matthew Church (Goldie’s)

COVER BANDS

Queen City Siren (Primal Brewery)

Josh Daniel & Friends: The Last Waltz Experience (Visulite Theatre)

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30

ROCK/PUNK/METAL

Johnny Delaware (Snug Harbor)

Hey RICHARD w/ The Obsidian Femmes (Starlight on 22nd)

POP/DANCE/ELECTRONIC/DJ

Bop to the Top Presents: Jingle Bop (The Underground)

Digital Noir w/ DJ Spider, DJ Price (The Milestone) Emo Night (The Rooster)

COUNTRY/FOLK/AMERICANA

Southside Watt w/ Anna J (Visulite Theatre)

FUNK/JAM BANDS

Pluto 4 Planet w/ Rod Fiske (Goldie’s)

Mud Tea (Smokey Joe’s Cafe & Bar)

HOLIDAY

The Strong Queens: Holiday Candelight Concert (Booth Playhouse)

Girl Named Tom: The Joy of Christmas (Knight Theater)

COVER BANDS

Guardians of the Jukebox (Amos’ Southend) On the Border (Eagles tribute) (Middle C Jazz)

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1

HIP-HOP/SOUL/R&B

Peezy (The Underground)

JAZZ/BLUES

Omari & the Hellhounds (Comet Grill)

POP/DANCE/ELECTRONIC/DJ

Hazy Sunday (Petra’s)

Soul Sundays feat. Guy Nowchild (Starlight on 22nd)

CHRISTIAN/GOSPEL/RELIGIOUS

Gospel Sunday feat. Christian Anderson (Middle C Jazz)

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2

JAZZ/BLUES

The Bill Hanna Legacy Jazz Session (Petra’s)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3

ROCK/PUNK/METAL

Red Rocking Chair (Comet Grill)

TRIVIA ANSWERS

1. Heart of the Ocean.

2. Tunisia.

3. Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

4. O. Henry.

5. 1945.

Nicotine.

Benjamin Harrison.

Lithium.

Minotaur.

10. A special bread in Jewish cuisine.