The Best of 2007

This is our exhaustive selection of the best and some of the worst of 2007 - a very, very busy year. The winners all receive an imaginary no expense spared statuette looking remarkably like an Oscar, but with the torso and hat of our logoman Mr Sleuth.

Best restaurant: Luso on Bridge Street
Portuguese influenced world food delivered in an intimate setting with good service. Gordo swears by the pork vindaloo

Best pub: Tandle Hill Tavern between Rochdale and Middleton
In a pocket of countryside with home-made meals and a great landlady, all in a hamlet graced by the name of Slattocks

Best newcomers: Grado on New York Street, City; Vermilion in the back of beyond; The Northern on Tib Street, City.

Most protracted bar opening in the world: Ithaca
Arnie Hira's superbar and restaurant on John Dalton Street is now entering it's thirteenth year of construction

Most meat imaginable: Pau Brasil on Lever Street
The editor still dreams he has a fillet steak in each hand, lamb chops for epaulettes and a hat fashioned from pork ribs

Best shop: Rags to Bitches, Tib Street
Not only is it spookily cute, like wandering into your mad great aunt's bedroom in her crumbling pile on a windy moor, but it's now introduced a dress-making service too

Best new building: Manchester Civil Justice Centre
A cathedral for lawyers and plaintiffs to worship at - verve, panache, masses of glass and lots of pioneering enviromental Green features

Best re-invention: Piccadilly Plaza as City Tower; Manchester City as an attractive football team
Just when you thought both were beyond saving

Best art gallery/museum exhibition: Art Treasures: 150 years, on at Manchester Art Gallery
Great art to view but also the whole shebang holds a mirror up to Manchester today and says, "look, see what this city can achieve".

Best film: Control
It had to be the biopic of Ian Curtis of Joy Division from Anton Corbijn

Best new entertainment: Lucky Voice, Tiger Tiger, Withy Grove, City
Even diehard karaoke haters can't resist a go in these nifty pods, all together now, 'Gold. Always believe in your soul....'

Best new visitor attraction: Chill Factore, Trafford Park
A 'biggest this, broadest the other' collection of indoor ski-slope superlatives on the slippery slope to success

Best hoax: The Greenhalgh's of Bolton
For fooling the town's museum plus the Art Institute of Chicago with fake Egyptian and Paul Gauguin statues

Best radio show: Eamonn O'Neal and Diane Oxberry, BBC Radio Manchester
Funny and astute intro to the Manchester morning

Best event: Manchester International Festival
A magnificent first attempt. MIF made a splash internationally and not just with the wet weather

Best stageshow: Monkey at the Palace (for visual treats), Il Tempo del Postino at the Opera House (for crazy mesmerising oddness), Henry V at the Royal Exchange (for punch and power)

Best lesson not learned: Hilton and Cloud 23
The service levels and overall experience just aren't high enough (forgive the pun). We expected better

Best gig: Arctic Monkeys
First there was Old Trafford cricket ground but the real winner was the surprise gig in mid-December at the Apollo

Best Manchester band: Courteeners
Mouthy, cocky, love 'em or loathe 'em Manc guitaristas. Honourable mention goes to the Tings Tings too

Best classical gig: The Pianist
Mikhail Ruby's remarkable Manchester International Festival gig in the Museum of Science and Industry based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman

Best row: Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive and Peel Holdings
The sparky debate between the two about the Transport Innovation Fund aka Congestion Charging

Biggest PR gaffe: Congestion charging pics
The PR release quoting people in support of the Congestion Charge bid which turned out to show pics posed by US models not by, for instance, Rochdale van-drivers

Best debate: Manchester University's Centre for New Writing debate on Literature and Terrorism with Martin Amis. The Circle Club debate on Celebrity and Manchester Confidential's debate on the future of Castlefield

The special Morrissey award for putting your foot in it: Morrissey
With his controversial, misquoted, interview in the NME there can only be one winner: the man himself

Crap Manchester headline: MEN's alarmist cocaine story, Cocaine: the hidden epidemic, 5/11/2007
It actually proved that the epidemic was so hidden it possibly didn't exist, see Sleuth 9/11/2007

Best Manchester satire: House of Lords/ Supercasino article on Manchester Confidential
As voted for by an independent panel of Confidential staff, this was our article reporting the over-turning of the Super-casino proposal in East Manchester by the House of Lords - Old Folks scupper Super-casino. We'd also like to mention our April Fool in 2007 re the demolition of Manchester Town Hall, the Gun Girls story (Toy Story and The tallest £1 shop in the World in Sleuth. We'd also like to say, we're great, we are

Biggest disappointment: The Super-casino
Loads of jobs, lots of tourists and a controlled environment ditched by a Presbyterian called G Brown in favour of men in dirty underwear with credit cards in their back bedrooms gambling the family fortune on the web

Best larger than life food reviewer: Gordo
Could have been a number of people but this award goes to our own Gordo for his whole-hearted ransacking of restaurant wine stores across the city and for his review of Juniper which ran to two chapters

Most tedious fucking conversation: "Are you on Facebook?"

Most ludicrous piece of architecture: The Great Hall, The Trafford Centre
That chandelier, those statues. Oh God, please help....

Funny councillor award: Pat Karney
Sir Richard Leese ran him close this year but Karney wins for offering to live in the bins on Market Street as they are so clean - see our Trash Parade story

Idiot Councillor of the Year Award: Howard Sykes of Oldham.
He proposed renaming Oldham because it has a bad image. He proposed renaming it after a local river. Unfortunately Oldham doesn’t have a river, it's on a hill

Worst party of the year: The United Players' Christmas Ball
Millionaire children can't control themselves in kid's party with alcohol

Best party of the year: Boss Model Agency's eighteenth birthday bash
This spectacular event at Gorton Monastery was a mix of jaw-dropping beauty mingled with alcohol and crazy, slightly blasphemous, design. It was Gordo's jaw that was dropping the most as the 75,000 pics of extraordinary young ladies on this link shows

Most missed: Anthony Wilson, of course