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 cambridge“Egg in a jar,” $12.

Dining at West Bridge feels like being in a movie theater that’s still showing previews. One example from many on the menu: a small plate of calamari with whelks, cockles, and Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes ($13). It’s high-style and fascinating, with squid that’s shredded into impossibly fine, flat, linguine-size ribbons and placed in a briny broth filled with cockles and whelks. But the dish seems to be missing the main element—actual pasta. Gaudet told me he’d tried another version as a carbonara, and using that approach would have completed a dish that seemed more like a sauce.

The ambiance doesn’t align with the prices, which are on par with Aquitaine’s—in fact, some are a bit higher—and the service doesn’t, either. It’s casual and friendly most of the time, but when the servers don’t know the answer to a question, they don’t make much of an effort to find out. They also tend to either vanish when you need them or come to the table when you don’t, as if popping out of a cuckoo clock to ask if everything is delicious.

  • 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.