Anthony Pino has run Anthony David's, the corner restaurant at 953 Bloomfield Street, since 1997. Twenty-nine years on the same corner, through a neighborhood that has torn down and rebuilt itself more than once around him. This year, when he wanted to grow, he did not look for a bigger storefront on the strip that made him a Hoboken institution. He went down. Below SRO, the basement listening lounge tucked beneath his cocktail bar SRO, opened in late July or early August, matching the timeline co-owner Liz Pino gave Patch in June, built into what Patch's own reporting called one of the underground passageways and unused basements scattered under this town.
That is the part of the Hoboken food story this season that is easy to miss if you only scroll Washington Street. The strip itself is still doing what it always does. But the interesting new openings, the ones locals will actually be talking about this month, are happening in basements, on side streets, and around corners the main drag doesn't touch. By September 10th, the whole city turns back toward Sinatra Park for four days, because the Italian Festival is turning 100.
Washington Street ran out of room, so growth stopped going up
Pino opened SRO next door at 107 Tenth Street this past February, a small speakeasy-style room serving duck spring rolls and deviled lobster eggs alongside cocktails like a carrot and basil drink built on tomato liqueur. It did what a lot of Hoboken expansions do: it took the empty storefront next to an established business and turned it into a second concept. But when Pino wanted to add a third layer, there was no storefront left to take. So Below SRO went into the basement instead, built to hold about 50 people for drinks, food, and vinyl records.
Pino put the reason plainly to Patch: "It's something different from what Hoboken already offers," he said. The context matters as much as the quote. Patch's own reporting on the opening notes that Hoboken businesses are working with more than 100 liquor licenses packed into a city that runs about 1.28 square miles, and standing out on a strip that dense means either doing something no one else is doing, or finding space no one else has claimed.
For a resident, that is worth knowing because it changes where you should actually be looking for what's new. A restaurant scene with 100-plus liquor licenses in one square mile does not have room to keep adding storefronts. It starts adding depth instead. Below SRO is the clearest example of that pattern that has surfaced so far this year, and it is unlikely to be the last.
The other new openings are choosing side streets on purpose
The same pressure that pushed Anthony David's underground is pushing other new restaurants sideways, off Washington Street entirely. Patch's own local coverage flagged this directly when three new spots opened or announced openings away from the main strip this summer. Yala Halal American Food opened in late June at 155 Third Street. Poke Pot opened in May on historic First Street, part of a cluster of smaller businesses building there. Neither needed Washington Street foot traffic to make the move worthwhile.
That is a small but real shift in how the neighborhood's food map works. For years, "what's new in Hoboken" meant scanning Washington Street storefronts between the PATH station and the Heights. Increasingly, it means checking Third Street, First Street, and Bloomfield too. A resident who only walks Washington Street on a Friday night is going to miss a growing share of what actually opened that month.
There is a version of this same story happening at 518 Washington Street, where Cuban Pete's, a BYOB Cuban restaurant out of Montclair, is moving into the former Charrito's space. That one stays on the strip, but even here the pattern holds: it is reoccupying an existing footprint rather than adding new frontage. Nobody is breaking ground for new storefronts on Washington Street in 2026. Everybody is either going underground, going sideways, or refilling a space someone else vacated.
One weekend a year, the whole town still comes back to the center
None of that changes what happens the week of September 10th. The Hoboken Italian Festival, the Feast of the Madonna Dei Martiri, takes over Sinatra Park for four days every year, and this September marks its 100th Annual run, from September 10th through 13th. For four days, the gravity of the neighborhood shifts back to exactly the strip everyone else has been building around.
The festival's procession tradition honoring the Madonna Dei Martiri dates back to 1399 in Molfetta, Italy, carried into Hoboken's own street procession, ending in fireworks over the Hudson. This year's centennial adds a few things the feast has never had before:
- A "Salute to America" night on Friday, September 11th, with live country and classic rock from Krystal, Hoboken's own artist, and the returning band Austin City Nights
- A special 100th Anniversary Drone Show timed to the festival's centennial run
- A centennial viewing experience at Pier A with panoramic Manhattan skyline views and front-row access to the main stage
The dates are confirmed for September 10th through 13th, which puts the festival roughly a month before the city's separate Fall Harvest Festival, a smaller family event whose 2026 date had not been announced as of this writing. Worth keeping on the radar for early fall, but the feast is the one with a hundred years of momentum behind it.
How to actually use the week
If you live here, the practical move is to treat this stretch of September as two different events layered on top of each other, not one. The feast itself is worth building an evening around on its own terms: the procession, the fireworks, the Pier A vantage point, the food that has nothing to do with anything that opened this summer. That part of Hoboken does not change year to year, and this year it comes with a drone show it has never had before.
But the days around it are a good excuse to close the gap between what you think is new in Hoboken and what has actually opened. If your last few months of dinners have all happened within a block of Washington Street, Below SRO is a five-minute detour from a corner you already know, and Yala or Poke Pot are worth the extra two blocks off the strip. None of it requires waiting for a festival to justify the walk. The festival just happens to be the week the whole neighborhood is already out on foot.
Hoboken's compact enough that none of this asks much of you logistically. What it asks is that you widen the radius you're already checking. The main drag will always host the big civic weekend. Increasingly, it is not where the next new door is.
If you are weighing a move into a building near any of these blocks, or thinking about what a Hoboken address is actually worth to you this year, Carlos Beltran and the CB Lux team can walk you through the market street by street. Request a Private Consultation to talk through what's changing in this neighborhood before you decide where to plant yourself in it.
