Despite having a several good friends who live in Hoboken, I rarely venture over that way. Even though I discovered that it can take only 30 mins (on a really good day) to get there, I always seem to meet up with my friends in the city or BK. But what lured me here on a random Tuesday night was that the movie theater offers $6 movies on Tuesdays all day! So Allison, Steve and I went to go check out Trainwreck (I heart Amy Schumer and you should definitely go see it) but first Allison and I had dinner at Bin 14. While the south part of Hoboken is what most people think of when they think of Hoboken (busy bars, right out of college kids, etc, etc), the North part is much nicer, a bit calmer and more adult.
Bin 14 brings a bit of that maturity to the hood since it's a quiet wine bar which serves tapas food. Allison mentioned that they can be a bit snotty at times but they were pretty well behaved when we were there. I wasn't starving but since we were going to a 2 hour movie, it was probably better to eat some non-popcorn/candy food first. Like I mentioned, the menu is a bunch of small plates and then a few entree sized dishes. We decided to split the tomato, basil and balsamic mozzarella ($9), beet salad ($9), rock shrimp with polenta ($10), and charred octopus ($10). They actually have a whole section on mozzarella and they all sounded great. This one was closer to your basic order but it was solid and delicious. It's pretty hard to mess up a great piece of cheese with tomato and basil. Next I tried the beet salad and it was also a nice hard to mess up dish. It came with blood orange, pistachio, pickled fennel and mint - so all the right accents to a beet dish. Next I tried the shrimp dish which was the one I was most excited by. It was described as rock shrimp with polenta, pecorino and chili. Unfortunately, it really tasted more like a very heavy grit dish with bits of cut up slightly over cooked shrimp. Usually when I hear rock shrimp, I envision it in it's whole form (I mean it's not very big to begin with) that's' either fried or lightly tempura style, so I wasn't used to in this form. But the dish overall was too oily and greasy for me and the polenta was too runny - I generally like polenta to be a bit firmer in texture. Lastly I tried the charred octopus and this made up for the not to great shrimp dish. It was one long tentacle but charred very well - it wasn't too rubbery or dry. It was nicely done. Given that these were all small plates, we were still a little bit hungry so we split the roasted cauliflower with garlic and chickpeas ($8). Nothing really special about it but it felt like a nice healthy way to round out the meal.
I can see how if you lived in the area, this would be a nice, low key place to grab a glass of wine and hang out. They definitely had a lot of variety on the menu and if I did come back, I would have loved to have tried some of their pizzas or pastas but in an effort to cut down on carbs, I didn't try them this time around. If you're going to the movie theater down the block, this could make for a cute dinner/movie combo - plus I will say that it's definitely a more reasonably priced tapas place compared to the city. Total bill: $60 for 2 people with tax and tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
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