Restaurant Review: West Bridge in Cambridge

This Kendall Square newcomer has potential in spades, but feels incomplete.

By Corby Kummer | Boston Magazine |

restaurant review west bridge in cambridgeBeets with broccolini and fennel cream, $10. (Photos by Kristin Teig)

West Bridge, the new restaurant in white-hot Kendall Square, is a charming place that’s doing a good deal of skilled cooking. It’s run by two first-time owners who have worked their way up the local restaurant ranks: Matthew Gaudet and Alexis Gelburd-Kimler. They met when he was the chef and she was the general manager of Aquitaine, the successful South End brasserie that is reliable, professional, and fun.

Presumably Gaudet and Gelburd-Kimler spent a long time dreaming up their ideal restaurant, yet the place they opened feels like an unfinished canvas. The big, clean-lined space—located in the same complex as the Blue Room and the Kendall Square Cinema—has a stark, loftlike look, thanks to warehouse lights, painted concrete pillars, long wood-and-iron tables, and simple wooden chairs that could be from a French garden. It’s inviting, with terrace seating that feels lively and urban. And boy, is it noisy. You have to work to hear the people at your table. When friends complained, the server said, “The owner likes it that way.”

  • Chad Caufield

    Corby Kummer could not be more wrong in this meandering and misguided review of West Bridge. One has to wonder why this lone reviewer found so much imagined fault when seemingly every other review of this great new restaurant has been unfailingly positive. Try it yourself and why the adage that critics feel the need to be critical proves itself yet again, because West Bridge deserves its status as a people’s choice hot spot and dining destination.