Just in time for a vaxxed-up city, an incredibly thorough Best of New York

has named standout services, unique shops, and special spots in dozens of categories. Now that Curbed is part of New York’s digital family, we have decided to reimagine “Best of New York” as an online project—an ever-expanding resource that could rival Yelp in usefulness but feels more like a secret Google doc that gets passed among friends. We decided to double down and expand the number of entries we consider “best,” since the ideal upholsterer for fixing up a Craigslist sofa on the cheap is very different from the one for detail work on a rare Jean Royère Polar Bear sofa. Plus, in a year when more than 3,000 small businesses have closed in New York, many of them permanently, why not include as many painstakingly vetted listings as possible? To find the places recommended on these lists, which will be extended online at Curbed in the weeks and months ahead, we polled hundreds of stylish and savvy New Yorkers—set designers, curators, architects, and Scarlett Johansson among them—and begged them to tell us their go-tos. The result: our own Yellow Pages, containing only excellent places.