The results:

• READERS' CHOICES
• CRITICS' PICKS

• The year in dish
• The year in numbers
• A moment of silence: Stick a fork in these dearly departed restaurants.
• Online-exclusive photo gallery: Marvel at the craft of our Eat Out award winners in this mouth-watering display of superlative food and drink.
• Watch video interviews with the the 2007 Eat Out Awards Critics' Picks and Readers' Choice winners.
• Tell us what we missed: We'll be the first to admit that the five-borough eating and drinking universe is far too vast for us to cover everything. So let us hear from you.
• Nontraditional Eat Out awards: Help us decide a few less mainstream categories about the good, the bad and the ugly in New York dining.

A model year

These past 12 months haven’t been easy ones for restaurant and bar owners: The Man has been more involved in what, how and where New Yorkers eat and drink than at any other time in recent memory. Trans fats were banned, restaurants and bars floundered in a liquor-license tug-of-war, and the Department of Health went on a closings rampage. But the commotion didn’t deter you from dining out. A staggering 13,834 of you cast a record-breaking number of votes for the Readers’ Choice awards. Now we know where you prefer to splurge, which restaurant you were happiest to see reopen and your pick for the steakhouse that beats all others. Our critics weigh in on 25 additional categories, including which eatery is most hypeworthy, what restaurant butt we’ll begrudgingly kiss and where to sip a fine nightcap in Queens. Plus, we put together some bite-size highlights from the year in dining out, reveal a few gastro-statistics that may open your eyes, and observe a moment of silence for the places that served their final entrée. Restaurants and bars had it tough. But for the rest of us, it was a pretty tasty year.—Gabriella Gershenson, Eat Out editor

Photographs by Neil Beckerman

Clinton St. Baking Company