March has arrived, which means it is bracket time. If you’ve followed along for the last few years here on Smile Politely, you’re familiar with our tournament of Champaign-Urbana related things. We’ve done food and drink (2019), icons (2020), pizza (2022), parks (2023), and for our fifth (almost) annual tourney, we’re going back to the beginning.
In five years, a lot can change within the food and drink scene, and we know you enjoy knowing the latest happenings in the culinary world here in C-U. Thankfully, there’s a lot to choose from, and with the help of our editors and readers, we’ve seeded 32 “teams,” aka food and drink staples, to represent themselves and go head-to-head to see who will be crowned this year’s champ. Limited to one item per establishment max, here’s the field of 32.
The regions are named after the Final Four of our previous tournament on parks, of course.
There are some ground rules to our tournament though, which, first and foremost: Please don’t take this too seriously. You are a passionate person, we understand. We realize we’re putting completely different things up against one another in a fairly arbitrary and very non-scientific fashion. If we see you commenting on social media with something that seems a little too serious, we’re going to assume you didn’t read, and that bums us out.
Next, vote below for your pick — we know you probably haven’t had all of these! — but that’s okay because we’ll just look back to the first rule, and take a sigh of relief to know there’s nothing on the line here besides weird, fun pride.
As always, if you have questions, or simply want to give us a piece of your mind, contact us at [email protected].
While we’re at it, we’d be remiss not to mention we are currently running our Spring Donation Campaign for Smile Politely‘s Writers’ Fund, launched today. Please consider donating to help support the magazine and our mission (and get some Farren’s, that’s further incentive this time around).
Follow along on our social media channels to see progress as the tourney moves forward. Voting for this round closes Wednesday, March 20th at 5 p.m. CST. Thanks for participating and enjoy!
If you want to vote on Google Forms, go here.