Bin 14

The Restaurant

Bin 14 opened in November 2008 on the uptown end of Washington Street, four blocks north of Anthony David's, as Hoboken's first dedicated wine bar. It was Anthony Pino's second project — the small-plates Italian counterpart to the trattoria he had been running at 10th and Bloomfield for a decade — and it almost immediately set the template that competing wine bars across Hudson County have followed since. The room is narrow and industrial-chic: exposed brick walls, a long zinc bar at the front seating about a dozen, a back dining room of about thirty seats across small marble two-tops, and the open kitchen visible at the rear.

The menu is built around small plates designed to share across two or four diners with multiple wine pairings. House-made mozzarella served warm with sea salt and olive oil; a hand-rolled gnocchi with brown butter and sage; an octopus carpaccio with shaved fennel and Castelvetrano olives; a duck-confit ragù pappardelle that has become the room's signature winter dish; a wood-oven Margherita pizza with imported buffalo mozzarella; a seasonally rotating burrata-and-stone-fruit plate. Cheese-and-charcuterie boards run from a single-meat tasting up to a six-piece chef's board with house pickles and grilled bread.

The wine list is the room's defining strength: about one hundred and fifty bottles with an unusual depth of by-the-glass — forty rotating pours organised by style rather than region, designed to allow first-time wine drinkers to compare a Sancerre with a Soave or a Barbera with a Côtes du Rhône at the same sitting. The team runs frequent informal pairing flights at the bar, and Pino's regular wine-maker dinners (six to eight a year, ticketed) book out weeks in advance. For a Hoboken first date that wants conversation, learning, and an unhurried pace rather than a formal dinner, Bin 14 has been the right answer for almost twenty years.