Magic City’s Best all started during COVID. I have quite a few friends that are business owners in the restaurant industry and they were really hurting. I wanted to support them, but can only eat out so much.

We started throwing around the idea of seeing who had the best pizza in town, burger, etc and decided one day to just have a little friendly competition of the best pizza in town. We called around to over 10 pizza places and picked up the pizzas from every restaurant and had a little taste test at my State Farm office with just me and my employees. We had a great time and got to support many local restaurants. We scored the pizzas and declared a winner. We had a great time, and decided to do it again the next week with burgers, but this time also invited some friends around town. We did the same thing again, and it started building and building. We kept it as a blind taste taste and never revealed what order each restaurant finished, just declaring the winner each time.

We did this for every month of 2020 and had the idea of including a non-profit for 2021 as restaurants got back on their feet and people started to eat out again. What if we asked the restaurant to donate the food, and I would take that money and donate it to a new non profit each month. We started doing that for 2021 and it worked out great.

As the competitions got more popular, more and more people wanted to participate. I tried to think how I could include more of the Billings community and I thought maybe we could make this a big community event each time.

I teamed up with Billings Depot and created the Magic City’s Best Food Competitions that would be open to the public. Pizza, Burgers, Chili, Wings, and Tacos. 2023 was the first year of the Magic City’s Best competitions and we had thousands of people from around the area partake.

Each Event has gotten bigger and bigger, and 2024 is set to be the biggest!