Somehow, it’s 2026. Artificial intelligence is writing sonnets, your refrigerator has embraced surveillance capitalism and every parking meter in Marin requires an app, which in turn requires a DNA sample to operate. Fortunately, some things remain reassuringly analog: Marin still knows what it likes—and we still print it in our annual juggernaut “Best of Marin” edition.
For more than six decades, the Pacific Sun has chronicled this county’s enduring combination of natural beauty, cultural hipness and exquisitely specific opinions. “Best of Marin” is our annual celebration of it all: the restaurants and retailers, artists and artisans, musicians and makers, wellness wizardry, watering holes and assorted local characters who make Marin more than the sum of its estimable parts.
These winners were chosen by you, our readers, because sourcing the “best” is not a prescriptive practice so much as a descriptive result of your yearly votes for what impressed you most this year. As always, the tally proves pleasantly idiosyncratic and devoted to the people and places that give our community its character.
To introduce this year’s sections, I’ve enlisted the Pacific Sun’s own Nikki Silverstein and frequent contributors Don R. Lewis and Kary Hess, a formidable trio of writers with the wit and curiosity to capture Marin in all its splendor. My thanks to them for making me proud to be the steward of this editorial institution, and to designer Dina Kuhar and copy editor Suzanne Michel, without whose incalculable efforts, this very intro would read like an eyechart.
Mostly, however, the credit belongs to the businesses, organizations and individuals recognized in these pages, and to the readers who continue to support them. Shopping locally, dining locally and participating in the civic and cultural life of the county may sound like small acts, but collectively they are what keep Marin one of the best places to live on the planet.
So, here’s to the best of Marin, and to Marin continuing to be unmistakably itself.
And congrats to all of our wonderful winners. Cheers!
