Our sixth annual “Best of Folsom” campaign is finally finished, and we once again had well more than 2,000 responses to vote on the best Folsom has to offer! We decided to mix it up a bit this year in terms of reporting the results – with a long article about the Best Picks, and showing the top 3 winners. After all, you may know the best places to go to already, but it’s good to know of alternates, too! Besides, how many ways can you write “these guys brew a good cup of coffee”? We do realize that 90% of you haven’t even made it this far in the article and are skimming the results by now, but we won’t hold that against you! For the rest of you, we present this year’s Best of Folsom! Some new categories this year include Best Restaurant (Bidwell Street Bistro – by wide margin), Best Health Club (CalFit), and Favorite City Council Member (Kerri Howell), while we took off some of the less popular categories, and retired the “Best Mortgage Broker” and “Best Realtor”. Steve Heard always wins that anyway, and he was feeling sorry for the competition. 😉 Old favorites still ruled in a few categories… Best Breakfast was once again given to Gold Miner Cafe, a Folsom institution for many years now (Fifth ‘Best of Folsom’ award). Best Pizza was Chicago Fire, with well over half the votes in a city with many pizza options available! Red Robin once again has won Best Burger, and Trader Joe’s has dominated as grocer of choice since they moved in. Beach Hut Deli and Mr. Pickle were neck and neck for several weeks for best sandwiches, but Beach Hut once again prevailed. While there are lots of familiar faces, there is lots of new blood in the winners’ circle this year… Manderes has started their new restaurant and bar strongly, as it has won Best New Business 2008, came in second for Best Bar, and Brent won for Best Bartender. We were floored by the diversity of picks in some categories… one of our new categories, “Best Teacher” proved that Folsom has no shortage of excellent teachers. Sandra Gallardo Elementary provided the top 2 teachers getting votes – proof positive that they are doing good things at that school. We’d love to show the list of all the names of vote-getters, but to be honest, there were a LOT. Suffice to say, Folsom should be proud that it has such a great variety of teachers – they are a huge part of why Folsom schools always rank as some of the best in the state. Our biggest surprise was the additional category that we didn’t include! Azuar must have emailed all of their fans, because we got a ton of write-in votes for “Best Band”, even though it wasn’t on the ballot! Hats off to Azuar… they show us that it doesn’t hurt to ask! Here’s a sample of some of our favorite comments from our readers: “For cheapest gas, you should add Safeway – with the 10 cents off (or more), it’s been cheaper than Costco.” “Seriously improve the search… It sucks.” “100,000 uniques per month? are you smoking crack over there” “best place to see wild life (deer, turkeys etc..) Prison Road in the AM” “How about None of the Above for favorite city council member” ” You need a little more diversity. Folsom is becoming more diversified as it continues to grow. Peeps better get used to it.” How come you don’t have best (insert category here) listed? “Best place to go if you can expense it (can’t do that much or at all if one is in FM1)” “Best place to go running – wear an orange jumpsuit and go for a jog near the prison. You may get the best workout of your life!!!”
![]() Karen’s has the best desserts in town!
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