Best Of Hoboken Jersey City Guide: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of Hoboken + Jersey City Guide is and who runs it

The Best of Hoboken + Jersey City Guide is a readers' choice awards program produced by Hoboken Girl, the Hoboken-based publication owned by The Local Girl Media Group. It covers two neighboring New Jersey cities at once, Hoboken and Jersey City, and asks their readers to name the local businesses, people and places they favor in categories ranging from food to beauty to everyday services.

Hoboken Girl publishes the program on its own site rather than on an outside contest platform. The 2025 cycle lived at an address titled Best of Hoboken + Jersey City Guide 2025: Nominate Your Favorite Local Businesses, and every edition gets a similarly named page of its own on the hobokengirl.com domain. That means the publication itself hosts the form, counts the responses and announces the results, with no third-party ballot provider in between.

The masthead gives the program a local-media footing similar to that of other New Jersey readers' choice contests, though most of those are run by newspapers or regional publishers elsewhere in the state. What distinguishes this one is its hyperlocal focus: rather than covering all of New Jersey, it speaks to a pair of adjacent cities whose readers share restaurants, salons and shops, and it folds both communities into a single combined ballot.

The dated record of the guide's editions and rounds

The program is annual. Confirmed editions ran in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, and the publisher's own coverage of the 2021 guide shows the series reaching back at least that far, so Hoboken Girl has been producing it for several consecutive autumns. A 2026 edition is the natural next step given that pattern.

Each edition follows a two-round structure, and the 2025 cycle shows how the calendar falls. Nominations opened with the guide's launch and ran through 11:59PM on Tuesday, November 13th. Readers could nominate any businesses, people and places for each category during that window. Once nominations closed, the publisher counted them and announced the top three finalists in every category, with that finalist slate going live in late November so readers could vote again to pick the winners.

The publisher has described earlier editions in the same terms. Its coverage of the 2024 cycle said readers could nominate from the announcement through 11:59PM on Tuesday, November 12th, before a finalist round followed, which confirms the mid-November nomination deadline is the program's steady rhythm rather than a one-year accident.

What Hoboken Girl has not printed alongside the finalist announcement is the closing date of the second-round vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same applies to the precise opening day of the next cycle's nomination window, which the publisher posts only when each new guide page goes live.

How a supporter votes in the Hoboken and Jersey City ballot today

Supporting a business in this guide is a two-step habit. First comes nomination: during the autumn nomination window, a reader opens the current page on hobokengirl.com and types in the Hoboken or Jersey City businesses, people and places they want recognized, one choice per category. No account or purchase is described as part of this step; the publisher simply collects the nominations up to the stated 11:59PM deadline.

Second comes the finalist vote. Once Hoboken Girl announces the top three in each category, readers return to the site and vote for the winner. The publisher's stated rule for this round is once per day in all categories, which makes the daily return the central mechanic of the whole contest. A supporter who wants a business to win does not vote a single time; they come back every day the ballot is open and cast a fresh vote in every category where their favorite appears.

That daily rule shapes how local businesses campaign. The effective play is a reminder to customers each morning of the round, a link posted where regulars already follow the shop, and persistence across the full length of the finalist window rather than a single push. Because the ballot spans both Hoboken and Jersey City, a business draws on whichever community its customers call home, and a reader may vote in any category on the ballot even if they only care about one or two entries.

How this guide sits among New Jersey's other readers' choice programs

New Jersey has an unusually crowded field of public-vote awards, and this guide occupies the hyperlocal end of it. Where statewide and county-wide programs spread their ballots across broad territories, Hoboken Girl keeps its focus on two adjacent cities and folds them into one shared ballot, reflecting how closely intertwined daily life is between Hoboken and Jersey City.

The nearest neighbors on this site illustrate the range. The Best of New Jersey program and the Best of Jersey Shore Contest run at state and regional scale, while the Best of Bergen Community's Choice Awards and the Bergen & Morris Top Dentists ballot serve county audiences in the northern part of the state. The Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice belongs to a daily newspaper, and the Jersey Bites Monmouth County Readers' Choice grows out of a food-focused local publisher.

Against that set, this guide's differences are its publisher and its pairing of markets. Hoboken Girl is a lifestyle publication rather than a newspaper, its readership skews toward the communities it covers daily, and its combined Hoboken-plus-Jersey-City format means a business in either city competes on the same ballot. Its two-round structure, nominations then a finalist vote with daily participation, also matches the pattern readers of this site will recognize from the other New Jersey ballots listed here, making the daily-vote habit transferable from one program to the next.