158 Main — Restaurant in Cambridge

I’ve been coming to 158 Main for years because I love the food and the vibe and the servers. I always feel treated well, leave stuffed and happier than when I entered, and Esther is an absolute delight.

The homemade maple wheat bread is amazing and certainly deserves its own line of recognition here.

However, the person hosting comes up very short in their duties. Most recently, on a late weekday morning while I was happily eating, I saw 4 people (2 separate parties) enter, fail to be greeted or even acknowledged for several minutes, and turn around and walk out. I have personally observed that this individual frequently: is so quiet they are difficult to understand, offers no explanation for any lapse in service, and generally seems to forget what their main FOH duty is. I often see customers with openly confused expressions over the host’s lackluster demeanor and lack of urgency or direction. I’m sure the host is a lovely person—and there is something to be said for FOH who reliably shows up for their shifts—but they are costing my beloved brunch spot business and reputation! I strongly believe hosting is not the right position for this person. Maybe they’d be better suited to dishwashing or bussing or…hanging drywall somewhere else.

Overall, 158 Main is yummy and fun, if not quirky, and still worth dealing with the painfully awkward and ineffectual host. That’s small town...

The food is decent and the waitstaff has been pleasant the handful of times I've been in.

BUT...Orders in the past have always been incomplete or just completely wrong. (For example ordering a Caesar salad with chicken and getting a house salad with honey mustard instead of dressing.)

This morning when we decided to get breakfast take out, we called and no one answered. They're usually very busy so we waited a few minutes and then called again. An angry man answered and informed us that they were closed. We had checked the hours on google and it said they were open so out of confusion I said "Oh, you're closed? Ok." And the angry man then said "We've been closed every Monday for 12 years!" Well... how about you drop your attitude and treat your potential customer with mild decency.

I apologize for not memorizing your hours, I assumed that by 2016 you'd have figured out how to edit your hours on google. My mistake. I'd say next time I'll do I drive by to make sure you're open before calling but there won't be a next time for us. It's a shame because there aren't very many options in this small town but I'd rather go without than deal with this mans attitude before I've...

If you have a chance to eat anywhere else, take it. The food was basically average. Nothing horrible, nothing so fantastic that any of us would ever consider a repeat. If I were rating this just on the food, the rating would be about a 3. However, if you add in horribly slow service, delivered with fake, "folksy" diner charm (the waitress trying to come off as 1950's quirky and just being annoying) and then compound this nuisance with some wannabe-folk singer who sat there for the duration of our meal playing an amped-up guitar entirely too loudly, so loudly, that you could literally feel the music vibrating in your bones, at 1:00 during lunch rush, and everyone then having to scream over the noise to have a conversation, you have the makings of one god-awful headache-inducing horrible experience that none of us would wish on anyone. Average food, horrible service, and terrible, terrible...