Best downtown dining. Most original menu. Best chef. Best-kept secret.

And all gone. If there was a landslide winner in this year’s Best Of competition, it was Caitie Girl’s, the restaurant on East Jefferson Avenue that closed forever in September with the death of Aubrey Caitlin Barker in a traffic accident.

Caitie Girl’s won four categories, and by wide margins, but we’re creating a special category – call it most missed – and declaring the runner-ups as winners.

Surely, there was sentiment involved here – how could anyone not vote for Caitie Girl’s, given the tragedy that struck in the midst of voting? But the shuttered restaurant, which won last year for best original menu, was the real deal. Lobster pot pie? A horseshoe made with jalapeno corn bread? Barker, who opened Caitie Girl’s in 2007 when she was just 22, knew what she was doing in a kitchen, and she was not afraid to nudge staid Midwestern palates to places unfamiliar.

She should’ve called the place Pluck.

With virtually no money and plates from WalMart, Barker bet her future on herself and downtown, working long days to convert a once-proud restaurant that had been turned into a gym back into a restaurant again. Friends and family helped, tearing down wallpaper and painting and replacing carpet and doing a jillion other things. And Barker had lots of friends.

Springfield is a poorer place now that there is nowhere to go for brie-stuffed buttermilk biscuits and gravy served with grilled asparagus. But Caitie Girl’s is not forgotten. Put one more shake of pepper on your potato tonight. Add barbecued pulled pork the next time you make macaroni-and-cheese. Enjoy bacon. Most of all – as Barker reminded us in the things she said and the way she lived – have fun, and eat well.