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Best Sculpture Garden

Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden

Photo courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Walking Man by Auguste Rodin

An extension of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Cullen Sculpture Garden offers a collection of mostly bronze sculptures ranging from the early 20th to early 21st centuries. Find eight Auguste Rodin statues of nude — and sometimes headless — men and women in various states of distress or repose interspersed throughout the park. Four Henri Matisse bronze sculptures of nude backsides are mounted to the towering concrete walls that frame the garden. And the garden includes various abstract sculptures, such as Joseph Havel's "Exhaling Pearls" and Joel Shapiro's untitled boxy, vertical figure that looks like a person made of bronze rectangles, getting ready to kick a soccer ball. The park, which is free to visit, is open until 10 p.m., and at night, strings of dim yellow lightbulbs decorate the tree-lined brick pathways.

Best Performance Space

Matchbox 4 at The MATCH

Photo by Jack Gorman

One night there might be a live band accompanying Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. On another, the National Tap Dance Day Celebration might have taken over the modern space. Then, during some other evening, there's classical music by the Apollo Chamber Players or White Oak Trio. The Midtown Arts and Theater Center has four "matchboxes" available for rent for small performing arts organizations that might not have the resources to run their own venue, and each ranges in size, versatility and charm. It's hard to choose one over another — it's just that Matchbox 4 happens to boast some of the best acoustics in town, a perk that was hammered home during the H-Town debut of Australian improvised jazz trio The Necks. The space's swaths of blue and gray and the cushy seats helped too.

Best Club Revival

Rockefeller's

Photo by Marco Torres

For more than two decades, Rockefeller's was the Tiffany's of Houston live-music venues, a nicely appointed former bank that hosted immortals like John Lee Hooker, up-and-comers like Garth Brooks and, regularly, Texas heroes like Joe Ely and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Its high ceilings and balcony ringing the stage fostered an intimate atmosphere that made it feel like the crowd was right on top of the performers; tales of legendary shows under the "R" are legion. As smaller rooms grew less attractive to bigger artists, the owners of Star Pizza bought Rockefeller's and turned it into a wedding/private-event space for hire. But without a whole lot of fanfare, the owners changed course; Rudyard's alum Mike Sims has been booking shows there for coming up on a year now. In favor of high-priced touring talent, though, these days the calendar is full of regional favorites (Hamilton Loomis, Moses Guest) and plenty of veteran locals (Spain Colored Orange, The Mighty Orq, Journey Agents). The club's unexpected and welcome return fills a hole in Houston's music scene many fans barely knew was there.

Best Strip Club

Treasures

Somewhere along the line, in a city rich with gentlemen's clubs, "Treasures" became shorthand for this very particular type of establishment. And it wasn't by accident. Year by year, since its opening in 1996, Treasures built up a reputation for excellent service, food and, well, ambience. Whether you want to book a VIP event, treat a buddy to a bachelor's party or just roll solo, you're going to be treated like a king. But you won't pay a king's ransom for the extensive menu, especially during the generous lunch and happy hours. When's the last time you treated yourself? Treasures has just what you need.

Best Hotel Bar

Lawless

Photo by Patrick Feller via CC

Walking into Lawless feels like walking into an exclusive club. Tucked inside the iconic Rice Hotel in downtown Houston, Lawless is an old lawyers' hangout with an atmosphere that suggests it. Some of the dining chairs look like they were made for royalty, then later picked up in an antique shop. The rustic brick walls contrast with the elaborate chandeliers. And the lounge seating in the middle of the second-floor bar looks as though it belongs in a law library. The real appeal, however, is the balcony: It's one of very few downtown that isn't drowned out by dance music, ideal for a happy hour cocktail or glass of wine after a night of bar hopping on Main Street.

Best Radio News

Houston Public Media/KUHF

Photo courtesy of Houston Public Media
Houston Public Media News 88.7 news team

Rare among modern media organizations, local or national, Houston Public Media not only identifies the ever-blurry line between news and entertainment, but the journalists at News 88.7 do the best job in town of respecting it. The KUHF newsroom is staffed by journalists who do their homework, ask the right questions and provide listeners with enough information to make up their own minds rather than injecting reporters' personal opinions into a story. Unlike other outlets catering to the collective id with nonstop drama, tragedy and celebrity, KUHF consistently offers in-depth reports on issues that are truly important to the community, no matter how unsexy they may be — taxes, health care, education, traffic and the other stories that rarely make the 10 p.m. news but affect citizens' lives 365 days a year. The thing is, even when the content is bone-dry, Houston Public Media consistently proves that storytelling without sensationalism can still be compelling — and, dare we say it, entertaining.

Best Band Name

Secret Sands

There are three things that make "Secret Sands" a great band name. The first is that it instantly transports you away from the bayous and concrete that make Houston the city we know and love to another part of the world, one where we all leave footprints under a bright sun as the wind whips around us. Any name that evocative is a winner. The second is that it's got an air of mystery befitting a group that bills itself as a "noir organic electronics" band. The name just makes you curious about what they sound like. Last, it just rolls off the tongue in a really pleasing way. It's a fun pair of words to say. Secret Sands, like all good band names, is a phrase you wouldn't mind wearing on a shirt.

Best Jazz Club

Cezanne

It sometimes feels as if every corporate cocktail party or five-dollar-sign restaurant has a requisite jazz trio plodding out standards for diners to ignore. But true fans of jazz music know it demands close attention in the presence of other aficionados, and Cezanne is just the place for that. Crammed into a wood-paneled upstairs room above the Black Lab, Cezanne plays host to some of jazz music's heavy hitters, such as Horace Grigsby and Bob Henschen, in an intimate setting unlike any other in Houston.

Best Place to Ride a Train

Hermann Park

Photo by Ron Misrack, courtesy of Hermann Park Conservancy

The best part of going to Hermann Park to ride a train is you can get there by train. METRORail's Red Line runs parallel to the park, along Fannin, and there's even a stop that links up with the second train in the park, the Hermann Park Railroad, the tiny replica steam locomotive that all Houstonians should ride at least once.

Best Jukebox

Warren's Inn

Houston Press file photo

Excuse us for a minute while we rattle off an old-man "get off my lawn!" sentiment: Most bars today don't have jukeboxes so much as digital kiosks where you can play just about every song ever recorded. Sure, this is a good thing, but back in the day, true jukeboxes reflected a bar's very character. It was indicative of the vibe's joint. That's why Warren's jukebox — with its eclectic mix of Sinatra, Otis, Sam Cooke, Dylan, John Lee Hooker, Paul Simon, REM and Louis Prima, among many others — makes sense. Classic artists to go with a classic, old-school, no-nonsense bar where you go to drink, not to be seen.

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2017 Best of Houston

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