We obviously can't list for you every awesome thing to do in Hartford, or pinpoint every kick-ass Hartford institution. There's just not enough space and time here. We did a similar list last year, too, and we've got a few comebacks and a few new additions. We tried to pack as much in as we could, and we're feeling confident in our picks, so hopefully you'll see something new you want to try or something old you want to try again. And then if you're not into our list, the Best of Hartford Readers' Poll lists are right here, with all the people and places you voted for this past spring. So here goes:

The Streets of Hartford

There's some sweet stuff on the streets of Hartford. For instance, we're often finding ourselves ordering hot dogs and Puerto Rican food from the vending trucks in the city. Trucks are more popular these days, according to recent reports — restaurants are too expensive to run and complicated to manage, especially now, and so that means there are some real good chefs out there in trucks instead of kitchens. It's sort of a recession bonus! Cheap, good food "on wheels." There's Thai and Chinese on wheels, too, as well as ice cream, of course, and we swear we saw a slushie truck over on Franklin Avenue. We're into that.

Open Bar, Dude

Tanuki's only been open a year, but the Japanese noodle and ramen bar figured things out pretty quick. Get this, they have $10 open bar nights, or "Nickel Nights." On Friday evenings, you pay a $10 cover charge and, from 9 p.m. to 12 a.m., well drinks and draft beers are only a nickel apiece. It's ideal for a birthday/bachelor/whatever party kind of night out, where you can buy your friends, what, like 20 drinks for a buck? You'll be a hero. There's also a DJ on Fridays, DJ Robert the Hamm, who plays old-school hip-hop and rap. Seriously, this is economically minded partying we can "believe in."

(tanukinoodles.com)

Rock-'em, Sock-'em

There are many opportunities for the gung-ho-est, most committed and impassioned music lovers to see good, interesting, experimental, totally independent and not-always-local-but-definitely-indie music. Rock Yer Socks, formed in Manchester by a few friends looking to get good bands to play cheap and sometimes-all-ages shows, has been around for the past few years, booking artists from all over the country, and especially from the state. These shows are held at the Grady Tavern or the Charter Oak Cultural Center or sometimes other random Hartford-area locations. This is a burgeoning scene with committed and active-minded organizers and, essentially, partiers (in the not-necessarily-drunken way; they're big into all-ages locations so that everyone can join in). Rock Yer Socks shows are not for profit and they request recyclables or very small-scale donations (which contribute to future shows). RYS and the like help foster a healthy, much-appreciated sense of identity and community in the city.

(myspace.com/rockyersocksbooking)

For the Sexually Bold, or Bored, or Both

If you're the sexually adventurous sort, you might be interested in a place on Zion Street in Hartford called Leisure Time, a swingers club that hosts Saturday-night soirees. But before you get all gross in your pants about it, keep in mind that there are rules in swinging, and they're pretty strictly enforced. First, if you're just one, single dude, you're not welcome. This is couples and single-females only (presumably because it'd be a big "sausage-fest" otherwise). You're also expected to dress well and not be all messed up on drugs and alcohol (it's BYOB, so you can drink alcohol, just don't get all sloppy in the Roman bath). Oh, yeah, speaking of Roman baths, there are Roman baths and DJs, "Taiwan love chairs" (Google gave some indication that a Taiwan love chair is just a "bendy" chair, which sounds pretty comfy), recreation rooms, and a "video voyeur room." Sounds adventurous, right?

(leisuretime-club.com)

Heading North

Formed in the '40s by West Indian migrant workers, the West Indian Social Club (as it's now known) started out as a group of West Indians getting together to play dominoes and cricket and drink and converse and all that merry club activity. Now a live and forceful Hartford institution in the city's north end, the WISC is a huge draw for music, particularly reggae. Huge acts play here, and now comes the list of examples so that you and your friends will have a clearer idea of what it is that we are talking about: Beenie Man, Sizzla, Luciano, Barbee, Etana, Freddie McGregor and more. There's a great Web site that tracks these shows, although not totally consistently, but it makes a valiant attempt at keeping tabs on the reggae activity in the city. The site is, of course, hartfordreggae.com.

(oh, and westindiansocialclubinc.org)

Beer, Beer, Beer

Making beer might be everyone's favorite DIY activity, but few manage to make it a business. It's hard to make beer, and it can get pricey, so the guys who pull it off deserve a lot of respect. And this city's fortunate to have a nice selection of the "local flavor," if you will (and oh you must). Look, so, brewery tours/tastings/walks/hangouts at the Thomas Hooker Brewing Company, that'll cost you $10 on a Friday night for a pint glass (you can keep!) and all-you-can-drink tastings. Cambridge Brew House? That's a Tuesday party — 40-cent wings and $1-off pints. At the Willimantic Brewing Company, there's Sunday Stein Day, where you can bring in what they call a "drinking vessel," which we might call a "thermos" or a "milk jug" (just kidding, most people bring in their favorite pint glasses) — for a bit of a discount, like 75 cents to a dollar off. And East Hartford-based Olde Burnside Brewing Company makes beer that's distributed and sold all over New England. You can tour their factory, but you have to make an appointment. (Call (860) 528-2200.)

(hookerbeer.com; cambridgebrewhouse.com; willbrew.com; oldeburnsidebrewing.com)

Hartford Idols

Every year, the Koi Lounge in the Butterfly Chinese restaurant wins our readers' poll for Best Karaoke. And man they aren't kidding! You should see this place! Friday and Saturday nights draw huge crowds (get there well before 9:30, when it starts, so you can be ready to pounce when the books come out) and these are the crowds who really mean it when they sing. That's the only kind of karaoke worth participating in.

(butterflyrestaurantct.com)

Get Corny

Kind of an intellectual and physical workout activity, the Farmer's Cow — a group of six Connecticut dairy farms — is playing host to a "Corn Maze Adventure." The idea is that while you're making your way through the maze (with a four-page game sheet), you'll also be learning life lessons regarding the importance of locally grown food and eating healthfully and things like that. There's a mini-maze for little kids, the Mini-Moo-Maze. Don't underestimate the power of family fun. The maze is open until Nov. 8 at Fort Hill Farms in Lebanon.

(thefarmerscow.com/maze)

Come One, Come All, And Bring Your Own Alcohol

There's something so awesome about bringing your own alcohol to a restaurant. You save a few bucks and you get to drink whatever you want. It's just the best thing ever. We know a lot of restaurants typically make their money on booze, but we're willing to make it up to the licenseless restaurants by bringing our booze there and eating their food more often. Here's a few BYOB joints for you right here:

The Pond House Cafe, 1555 Asylum Ave., West Hartford, (860) 231-8823, pondhousecafe.com

Typhoon Thai Restaurant, 344 Main St., Middletown, (860) 344-9667, typhoonrestaurant.com

Ali Baba Cuisine, 836 Main St., Manchester, (860) 646-5330

Randy's Wooster Street Pizza, only this location: 1232 Storrs Road, Storrs, (860) 487-9662, woosterstpizza.com

Sports Games

Yeah, the New Britain Rock Cats, Connecticut's bigtime baseball team. They've had all-star players on their roster, like David Ortiz (whom we believe to be innocent) and Torii Hunter. The Rock Cats help sate the sports hunger here, which is something of a very large and slightly angry hunger (woe, the Whalers). So it's worth it to get out to a Rock Cats game and feel some of the localest pride and the thrill of baseball, America's fav sport.

(rockcats.com)

Public Discourse

It's easy, probably, to see the Connecticut Forum — or forums in general — as boring or uninteresting. A few people, some of whom you've heard of, some of whom you haven't, talking about a topic that's sort of broad and not always immediately interesting-seeming. But all of that is bullshit. There are actually several panels and forums around the city that entertain, educate, inform, etc. And the Connecticut Forum is a quarterly one that deals with current and relevant issues. The panelists are often national and international celebrities (Anthony Bourdain, for instance, spoke last year during a CTF discussion on the way we eat) and are consistently smart, often funny and can get nice and heated. Basically, the Connecticut Forum is like Jerry Springer meets "The Daily Show," at the Bushnell.

(ctforum.org)

The Gardens

The rose garden at Elizabeth Park is kind of a summertime site, being as the roses are at their bloomiest in July, but it's pretty much magically gorgeous year-round. It's quite a stunning spectacle, all these roses. There are about 800 varieties in the 2-and-a-half-acre garden, working out to about 15,000 plants. According to an informative video featuring Marci Martin, Elizabeth Park's head rosarian, the park, opened in 1904, was meant to be a nice place for people to come to "get away from it all." Martin explains, "It was meant to be an escape for people who lived within the city, so that they could get away from the dirt and the pollution and the smoke and the screaming and the disease and whatever."

(elizabethpark.org)

Finger Food

It's just this little place on Farmington Avenue, and there's this one adorable guy there who waits on all the tables, whether it's packed or you're the only customer in there. Packed or no, it's typically a leisurely experience. Expect to be there for, say, an hour and a half, possibly longer. And it's advisable to bring people with you; you need two players or more to do this thing the rightest for the following reason: The food at Abyssinian is served on one big, round, platter-sized sheet of spongy, sour-dough-y bread called injera, which absorbs the sauces and spices of the chicken or lamb or vegetable wots and tibs dishes. You tear off bits of the injera and use it to scoop up and eat the spicy a-little-bit-like-Indian-food food. It's messy as hell and your hands get all moist and spicy-smelling and at the end of the whole thing — this is the best — you get a steamy, moist towel to wash up with, and you start to wonder about the asshole who invented Wet-Naps. Why didn't he think of HOT TOWELS?

Little Big Screens

In plugging the little arty theaters, we don't mean to passively condescend to the multiplex around the corner. To be honest, those gigantic, fake-butter factories of powerhouse AC and super surround-sound give you a lot of bang for your 4-gazillion-buck ticket price; Transformers (or whatever) sounds pretty good at the multiplex, and it's fairly easy to sneak wine into them. However, the arty theaters — the Cinestudios, the Real Art Wayses, they're cheaper, more discerning places that play the good documentaries and the foreign and indie films that don't typically play at the big places. But they don't tend to snub the "mainstream" movie selections, either. This past summer, both Bruno and Star Trek played at Cinestudio; In the Loop (that Gandolfini movie) and Food, Inc. played at RAW. (Plus, Real Art Ways even serves booze, so you skip needing to stuff bottles of wine into your pants.) Cinestudio's on the Trinity College campus and Real Art Ways is over in Parkville.

(cinestudio.org; realartways.org)

Counting the Shops on the Berlin Turnpike

The Berlin Turnpike looks a little drab, which is part of its big appeal, and mystery. There are many things to do on the BT (which, we swear to G., has its own Wikipedia page), and all these things are condensed into one 11-mile strip. There are diners, bowling alleys, restaurants, stores, sex shops, strip malls, bars, and endless (OK, 11) miles of fun.

(LOL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Turnpike)

The Other Other Sport

Baseball may be America's pastime, but in Hartford another game with balls and bats — cricket — is just as popular. To get a taste for how serious Hartford takes its batsmen and bowlers, drop by the city's Cricket Hall of Fame (that's right, Springfield can have the hall of fame for basketball, and Holyoke, Mass., just up the road, can have one for volleyball; we'll represent for the cricketers, thanks). World-famous players are inducted periodically and vintage memorabilia is on display. If you want to see the game in action, pay a summer visit to Riverside Park, or Bushnell Park or Keney Park (said to have some of the finest cricket grounds in the U.S.) where formal teams and casual groups are out showing off their skills.

(crickethalloffame.org)

Right Round Baby Right Around

There are two record stores on the Silas Deane Highway. One is very small, the other sort of hard to get to. Naturally, slight inconvenience is all relevant to vinyl culture. It's the vague difficulty to get it all going that legitimizes vinyl, and so the GPS-challenging Records and Things and Integrity 'n Music fit the profile. These shops are very serious about records. While this atmosphere can be intimidating for the record rookies, the people working and shopping in R&T and InM are helpful, enthusiastic and they know their shit.

(integritynmusic.com; Records and Things is Web-site-less.)

Private-Party Parties

There are people out there who go meet up in public places, put their headphones on and dance together. This is called a silent rave, and, though it isn't silent, per se, there isn't any openly played music. You can look on Facebook for these events; they don't happen incredibly often — maybe a few times a year — but they get big turnouts when they do. You can say it sounds stupid, but it actually seems appealing, doesn't it? It's like one big party compromise.

(Search for "silent raves" on the World Wide Web, or search Facebook. You probably didn't need us to tell you that, though.)

Adventurous Eating

There are some things we as Americans get all squeamish about eating. That's so stupid. If people eat — and restaurants serve — certain foods, that means there are people who want to eat it, which means there's something about it that's obviously delicious, which means we as Americans need to start broadening the old horizons. For instance, Piolin Jr, a Peruvian restaurant in East Hartford, they serve grilled beefheart. There's good, fatty slabs of roast pork at Las Palmas in Wethersfield (say hi to the owner, Omar, who smiles big at you before squeezing 25 pounds of meat into a Styrofoam container and charges you, like, $6). At Antojitos Mi Guatemala, there's sopa de pata de res, or, literally, "cow foot soup." It's salty as hell, but you counter that with some lime wedges. And at Cora Cora, another Peruvian restaurant in West Hartford, you can order cuy, or guinea pig, a Peruvian specialty. Though you won't find it on the restaurant's regular menu, Cora Cora does serve it from time to time, so call ahead and see if you can give it a try.

(These restaurants don't have Web sites, but you can still look them up in an online phone book! While you're doing Googles, stop by weird-food.com, a poorly designed site detailing all the weirdo things people eat — like monkey toes or squirrel brains.)

Be Very Sketchy But Totally Legal

In Connecticut, it is legal to drink in a car if you are a passenger. We say this is most likely the best way to have a good time on wheels (maybe even on the Berlin Turnpike!), while also torturing whoever you sucker into being your driver. Windows down, feet out, wind in your face, volume way up, smoking cigarettes, "seeing the sights," and, probably best, cop-fishing. Get pulled over by a suspicious cop and show him how legal you're being. Cheap thrills!

(opencontainerlaws.com)

Abstract Art and You

We've seen some stuff we wanted to call bullshit on at Real Art Ways. And we've seen other stuff we had to have smarter people tell us about to help us begin to appreciate the experimental and modern art you can see at this Parkville gallery. Either way, the exhibits are interesting at RAW, and the monthly cocktail hours are inarguably some of the best events in the city. Food and good music and wine and beer and tricky art and quirk and square spectacles ... it's really another of Hartford's arty scenes that "keeps it real"; it's easygoing, "hip" and well respected.

(realartways.org)

There are a quite a few noteworthy museums, theaters and attractions in Hartford. These are the classics, the things Hartford is truly known for, reminding us that there's a lot to see and be proud of about Connecticut's capital. They're like Hartford "givens." Classics.

Hartford's Met

You probably already know that the Wadsworth Atheneum is the country's oldest public art museum. It's host to traveling national and international exhibits and the Wadsworth's own collections include many French and Impressionist pieces. The downtown museum also holds monthly cocktail hours, Phoenix After-Hours, which rival Real Art Ways's Creative Cocktail Hour in the game of what's-cool-to-do-in-Hartford.

(wadsworthatheneum.org)

Dead People's Houses

You can totally tour Mark Twain's crib, or Harriet Beecher Stowe's or Noah Webster's. It's pretty cool and weird to stand in roughly the same spot Mark Twain might have, possibly while he was whistling or brainstorming or yelling.

(marktwainhouse.org; harrietbeecherstowecenter.org; noahwebsterhouse.org)

More Art, More Booze

The New Britain Museum of American Art is a smaller museum than the Wads., but its mix of contemporary and classical art is noteworthy. In the past, the museum has had Pulp Art exhibits, as well as photography and student art and more. NBMAA has its own cocktail events, workshops, tours, talks, panels and lectures.

(nbmaa.org)

Art and Cultcha

The Charter Oak Cultural Center is rich in history and in culture. The old synagogue is a Hartford staple: You can take classes, see art exhibits, film, dance, plays, music. There are also frequent punk-rock events: concerts (see our Rock Yer Socks blurb on page 4) and forums and festivals.

(charteroakcenter.org)

Futurama

The recently opened Connecticut Science Center has made an impression on the city's skyline (you've seen that angular architecture over I-91, yes?) and on the city's museum scene. We've already pointed out the places you can go see art, but here at the Science Center, you'll find 150 hands-on exhibits, a 3-D theater, educational labs, and other programs and events. Hit it.

(ctsciencecenter.org)

Theaters Here, Theatres There

OK, for pro theater we got TheaterWorks Hartford (not to be confused with the unaffiliated TheatreWorks New Milford) and Hartford Stage. Both bring in musicals and comedies and dramas and things. Other, localer, theater companies are also all over the area: Hole in the Wall, Playhouse on Park (formerly Park Road Playhouse), CT Cabaret, the Phoenix Theatre Company. You can also see good music and plays and stuff at the Bushnell and at the Jorgensen (at UConn) and at Cheney Hall or at the Hartt School.

(theaterworkshartford.org; hartfordstage.org; hitw.org; playhouseonpark.com; ctcabaret.com; phoenixtheater.us; bushnell.org; jorgensen.uconn.edu; cheneyhall.org; harttweb.hartford.edu)

Bean Streets

La Paloma Sabenera is a coffeehouse, meeting place, art gallery, performance spot, breakfast joint, panini cafe and overall city favorite. Every place needs its local coffee spot, and this is Hartford's.

(lapalomacoffeehouse.com)

... And Beyond

Infinity Hall is a relatively new music venue, over in Norfolk, and it's a small, rustic theater that draws a lot of stuff your parents like — Orleans, Herman's Hermits, Todd Rundgren — and stuff you liked in high school — Gin Blossoms, Paula Cole. It's an intimate stage that allows for pleasant discourse between audience and performer, and there's a bistro above the theater where you can have dinner while watching the show.

(infinityhall.org)