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Best Place to Buy Cigars

Cigar Cigar!

It's worth the drive to Sugar Land to check out Cigar Cigar!, located in the city's Town Square. The place may seem a bit small, and the hand soaps and lotion for sale are an odd addition, but the roomy humidor is one of the best around. You'll find all the standards at standard prices, along with an array of interesting brands such as Vengeance, Acid and Delirium. We didn't try the $30 God of Fire, but it looked like a beast. The real gem of the store is the Diamond Lounge, a members-only back room that costs $59 or $99 a month, depending on the level of membership you want. Members get private lockers for stashing cigars or booze or whatever, and the place gets pretty lively on weekend nights, with poker games lasting well into the morning.

Best Place to Buy Good, Cheap Art

Premium Goods

You can buy art and tennis shoes at this year's winner for Best Place to Buy Good, Cheap Art. Premium Goods has built a reputation for regularly having exhibits of cutting-edge outsider and urban art. (A new show goes up every four months or so.) The artists here (Melinda Mosheim and Y.E. Torres among them) show work that has a decided pop, graphic vibe, popular among young — and often financially challenged — art lovers. Many produce graffiti-like paintings; others veer toward the torn collage aesthetic, and still others embrace wheat-paste posters. The one unifying aspect of their work? It's all modestly priced.

Best Place to Buy Music

Cactus Music

What more can you ask from a record store than free beer and free concerts? Every weekend, Cactus Music offers up heaping cups of suds from Saint Arnold's and lively, intimate sets from some of the best touring acts in the land. Just this past May, Steve Earle pounded out an hour-long set of his own tunes and those of his mentor Townes Van Zandt. Cactus has returned stronger and better than ever after a two-year absence from the Houston scene, and owner Quinn Bishop has embraced the new vinyl music movement with ferocity. He's devoted a whole side of his space to new and old sides of indie and country and all things in between.

Best Place to Buy Socks

American Apparel

Admit it, one of the best things about American Apparel is the ads featuring scantily clad hipster chicks in big glasses sporting vacant glares. The Los Angeles-based clothing chain caters to the young and irrational, who are more than willing to pay close to $40 for a mere plain white T-shirt. We love going to AA to pick up socks and catch up on all the lower Westheimer gossip, live and in person. Sure, we could hit up Wal-Mart, but what's the fun in that when we could hear Animal Collective blaring over the cackles of Nylon magazine come to life?

Best Pool Service

Sweetwater Pool & Patio

Sweetwater Pool & Patio is aces at pool cleaning, repairs or remodeling. Need a pool refinished, but dread the ordeal of draining, refilling and all the horrendous chaos in between? Manager Cesar Tena and his crew sweep in and out, leaving nothing behind but a sparkly, concave pearl of a hole in the ground. Tena will patiently walk his clients through the how-tos of caring for a swimming pool, and his cleaning services are prompt and thorough. The storefront has the cleaning and upkeep materials you'd expect, but — no doubt owing to its Bellaire location — considerably more pool accessories. The "Patio" portion offers up some juicy barbecue accessories as well.

Best Psychic

Diane Gremmel

You usually have to be a psychic to find a good psychic — but we've done the legwork for you: Diane Gremmel, a medium who teaches psychic development courses at Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment Health Center & Spa, really cares about mentoring people. "There's no such thing as bad info, just info that's out of time," she says. Gremmel's client readings are empowering, and she doesn't rely on parlor tricks like using info easily found on Google. Plus, she looks like an angel. Look for her also the first Saturday of each month at Marva's Alternative Health & Psychic Fairs, at the La Quinta Inn Galleria, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Best Realtor

Mike Copenhaver

For more than 25 years, Houston native Mike Copenhaver has been getting people into homes and leaving behind him a trail of satisfied buyers, sellers and renters. Energetic, honest and deeply knowledgeable about Montrose, Bellaire, West U and other parts of town, he's become the go-to guy for people seeking a guide through the current economic minefields of homebuying. Yes, he's an Aggie, but some things can't be helped.

Best Spice Shop

Lone Star Culinary

Located just across the street from the open-air vegetable market on Airline in the Heights, Lone Star Culinary has more than enough spice to complete any meal. There are troughs of dried chiles, shelves stacked with hard-to-get items like Steen's cane syrup, and a wall that stretches the length of the warehouse-like building piled high with dried spices and roots. They've got everything from allspice and aniseed to verbena and sarsaparilla. But if the variety is overwhelming, they also offer up homemade spice blends ready to go, including seasonings for hot wings, tamales, carne guisada, a lemon fish fry and pickling. Plus, what other spice store gives you the option of buying a piñata on the way out the door?

Best Tobacco Shop

The Briar Shoppe

The Briar Shoppe, a perennial Best of Houston® winner in tobacco-related categories, has all the things a tobacco shop is supposed to have: a great selection of cigars in nice humidors, a wall stocked full of pipe tobacco and tobacco for rolling your own cigarettes, and the complete spectrum of smoking supplies. But what sets this place apart is the staff, ready to tell you anything you want to know and sample just about anything worth sampling, whether you're buying or browsing and whether the store is empty or busy. On a recent trip, we wanted to try something a little different than just some cigar with a crazy name, and the saleswoman suggested nasal tobacco to snort. We were skeptical at first, but the woman walked us through the process, tapping out a fine powder on our hand and instructing us to snort. As always at the Briar Shoppe, we were steered in the right direction.

Best Toy Store

Lakeshore Learning Store

This is where a kid can not only be a kid but be a smart kid, too. The store's shelves and aisles burst with colorful and fun games aimed at teaching and helping children develop their language, math, science and social studies skills. There are no video games or war toys here. Instead, shoppers find puzzles and books and every type of arts and crafts under the sun. The staff, who include many former preschool teachers, are helpful and friendly and chock-full of inventive suggestions. The store even hosts free arts and crafts for kids from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. every Saturday.

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