An Excellent Stop For Dinner - The Main Street Cafe
Written: May 11 '05
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Pros: Good food, Big portions, Excellent service
Cons: Basic Menu (nothing fancy)
The Bottom Line: The Main Street Cafe offers something for everyone when it comes to good food.
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| jps246's Full Review: Main Street Cafe |
The Main Street Café in Medway, Massachusetts won’t blow anyone away, but it does provide solidly good food in well-sized portions at reasonable prices. No one visiting the restaurant should leave hungry or have trouble finding something that they want to eat.
Where is it?
Medway is located in what’s called Metrowest, Massachusetts. It’s the suburbs that are just west (and a bit south) of Boston. The restaurant is located right on Route 109, which is the main road that runs between Interstate 495 and Interstate 95 (with the town of Milford on the 495 end and Westwood on the 95 end). Medway is about a 1/3 of the way between the two highways – so The Main Street Café is closer to 495 than it is to 95.
It’s located in a small shopping mall in what is the commercial center of Medway. Parking is never a problem and is free. The only hard part about coming or going is making a left turn onto Route 109 when you’re leaving, you might be waiting for quite some time for a break in traffic.
When’s this place open?
The Main Street Café is open for both lunch and dinner 7 days a week. It opens at 11 in the morning and closes either at midnight or 1am, depending upon the season (it’s open later in the summer).
The full-menu is available from 11am until 10pm. After 10pm, only appetizer platters are available and service is generally restricted to the bar area.
Main Street doesn’t accept reservations and it’s rare, except for Friday and Saturday nights that there will be a wait for tables. However in those instances, there is plenty of waiting room and you can get a drink at the bar while you are waiting for your table.
Main Street doesn’t have a website, but their phone number is 508-533-2888.
What’s on the menu?
For an individual, family run restaurant, The Main Street Café offers an extensive menu that offers choices for just about every taste. There are chicken dishes, fish, steak and various pasta dishes. Plus each day they run specials that aren’t available on the regular menu.
The menu is the same throughout the day, there’s no separate lunch menu. The only change that occurs is that after ten at night, you can only order appetizers off of the menu.
The Main Street Café’s menu is broken down into two major sections, the Appetizers and sandwiches and then the full-blown entrees. In addition to just appetizers and sandwiches, there are also salad choices and soup choices.
The Appetizers
If you order an appetizer at The Main Street Café, expect to get a lot of food and make sure you save some room for dinner. The average appetizer easily feeds 4 people and is almost a meal for 2 people.
The appetizers are all fairly basic, but they do taste good. Main Street offers everything from garlic bread to crab cakes. My favorite has to be the basic nacho appetizer they offer. You get a large platter of chips covered in cheese, along with lettuce, tomato and sour cream. The nachos are so big that if my partner and I order it alone, we rarely if every finish it – this (and the nachos supreme, which add spicy beef and a few extra vegetables). The buffalo wings and the buffalo chicken fingers are both spicy, but not extra hot, however you do get enough chicken to comfortably feed four people without someone feeling slighted. There are also onion rings, regular chicken fingers, popcorn shrimp, shrimp cocktail and a combination plate that includes the chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks and potato skins.
The prices on the appetizers run from about $3 for garlic bread up to $8 for the shrimp. The great majority though are about $6.
Soups
If they haven’t run out yet, the chicken noodle soup at Main Street is one of the best items on the menu. However, they tend to run out of it later in the evening on busy nights.
In addition to the chicken noodle, Main Street always serves New England Clam Chowder and they have a ‘soup of the day’ that changes each day. I’m not a fan of clam chowder, but friends have had it and said it was okay.
There’s only one size available for soups, which is a large bowl (a single serving of soup makes an excellent appetizer) and the soups are all about $2 each.
Salads
Whether it’s a salad with your dinner or something big enough for a meal, Main Street offers quite a few different kinds of salads. The basic house salad (lettuce, cucumber, tomato, croutons and olives) or Caesar salad comes with most of the entrees, but is also available separately if you want a salad with your sandwich.
For bigger, meal sized salads there are chef, tuna, lobster and antipasto salads available and for those who like some meat on their salad, there is both a grilled chicken house salad and a grilled chicken caesar salad.
If the salads don’t come with your entrees, they run anywhere from about $2 for the house salad to about $8 for the chicken caesar salad.
Sandwiches
If you’re not in the mood for a full dinner or you want something light for lunch, Main Street has a bunch of different sandwiches to choose from. They have both hot and cold sandwiches and all the sandwiches are served with your choice of fries, coleslaw or potato salad.
The cold sandwiches include a tuna and a chicken salad sandwich and a lobster roll (it’s a New England thing – there are lobster rolls everywhere). The hot sandwiches offer a bigger selection with several different kinds of chicken sandwiches (BBQ, parmigiana, and smothered), beef (French dip, veal parmigiana, smothered steak, roast beef club) and for fish lovers, your choices are limited to a haddock melt.
My favorite sandwich has to be the open-face teriyaki steak sandwich. It’s a small six ounce sirloin steak cooked in teriyaki sauce and served on top of french bread. It’s great when you’re in the mood for a steak but don’t want to have a full-sized portion.
The sandwiches start at just over $5 and run up to just over $7 (the Lobster Roll) – but the majority are about $6.50.
The Entrees
If you’ve got the appetite, there’s probably an entrée waiting for you at The Main Street Café. They offer beef, seafood, chicken and pasta dishes and all told there are almost 40 different entrees to choose from in addition to the 3 nightly specials that are available each night.
All of the entrees come with bread and butter, your choice of salad or soup and your choice of potato and vegetable (except for the pasta dishes – they don’t come with potato or vegetable, just the salad or the soup). Honestly if you have a regular appetite, the entrée with its salad and bread is more than enough food for the average person. If I have an appetizer, there’s no way I can come close to finishing my dinner (that’s not to say I don’t normally take food home anyway).
There’s a full selection of steaks including filet mignon and prime rib (which is only served Thursday through Sunday nights). However my favorite dish at Main Street is the Sirloin Tips. They offer two different versions of this dish, either the steak tips as is (with just the marinade flavor) or covered in teriyaki sauce. Either way is excellent, but I tend to get the original ones, without the teriyaki sauce.
There are also pork chops and baby back ribs on the menu if you don’t want a steak, but want to stay away from the seafood or the chicken.
The steaks are the most expensive items on the menu – starting with the tips around $12 and going up to the filet mignon and the specialty steaks around $16.
I’ll be honest and admit I’m not a seafood person (though that’s changing because of things out of my control) so I have never personally eaten any of the seafood dishes at Main Street. However both my partner and friends have had these dishes and have enjoyed them. They offer baked, broiled and fried seafood dishes including baked haddock, broiled scallops, baked stuffed shrimp, fish and chips, and fried clams.
When I took my Mom here she loved the friend clams and my partner regularly gets the baked haddock or the fish and chips.
If you can’t decide on exactly what you want when it comes to seafood, there’s both a fisherman’s platter with haddock, scallops, clams and shrimp and a combo platter that gives you a chance to pick two of any of the seafood items on the menu and have them together.
Prices on the fish dishes run from about $10 to around $15.
Not looking for steak or seafood? How about some chicken?
Main Street offers 7 different chicken dishes that include basics like chicken fingers and more creative dishes like chicken marsala or smothered chicken. The chicken parmigiana platter is literally breathtaking when they bring it out – it’s a huge plate full of pasta and covered almost completely with chicken. You are guaranteed to be taking leftovers home (I do every single time I get this and I have 2 or 3 meals afterwards at home).
The chicken dishes average around $10.
Finally if nothing else grabs your fancy, there are several different pasta selections available. You can get linguini or ziti either plain or with marinara sauce (perfect for really picky people), lasagna, shrimp scampi, veal parmigiana or chicken and broccoli alfredo.
My best friend swears the shrimp scampi is one of the best she’s ever had – she gets it just about every time we go. I’ve been known to get the ziti with the marinara sauce when I don’t want to eat a lot and my partner says that the lasagna is quite good. The chicken and broccoli alfredo appears to be hit or miss – I’ve gotten it a few times and it’s been good, while others that have gotten it when I haven’t said that the alfredo sauce wasn’t that good.
The pasta dishes are the least expensive dinner entrees and run from about $8 up to $12.
More Menu Stuff
There is a kids menu (actually a ‘section’ on the main menu) that offers a choice between a hamburger, chicken fingers, fish and chips or linguini. The portion sizes are smaller than the average entrees and are served only with French fries, no soup or salad.
Main Street serves coke products and offers a full-service bar.
There are some desserts available, but they are not that remarkable. They have several different kinds of pies and ice cream.
Experiences
When I lived in Medway, my partner and I were regulars at Main Street - we at there enough to know all the staff and get the jovial welcomes from everyone. The reason we ate there so often wasn’t just because it was close, it was because the food was good. We both enjoyed the restaurant and we enjoyed the service we got there. Out of all the years of eating at The Main Street Café, neither of us have had a bad service experience.
Now that I don’t live in Medway, I still make sure to get to Main Street when I can. Luckily for me, several of my friends still live in the area and Main Street makes for an excellent meeting point.
I’ve had quiet dinners with my partner and big parties with friends at Main Street – it’s a great place for just about anything and because they aren’t forced to conform like the chain restaurants, they can usually honor most requests (for large groups or for parties).
The times we’ve had parties at Main Street, they have blocked off part of the restaurant so we wouldn’t be interrupted.
I have had the occasional ‘not so great’ meal at Main Street – at one time they seemed to have really fatty roast beef for their club sandwiches and the french dip sandwiches. All it took was a quick question to the waitresses and the problem was taken care of, though in the case of the roast beef, they offered to take the sandwich off the bill because the remaining roast beef they had was just as fatty.
I don’t go to Main Street expecting the finest foods and cuisine, instead I go expecting something that I know I will like and knowing I will get good service. I can go to the newest and latest restaurants for fancier meals, but with Main Street I know what I am going to get and I know I’m going to have a good time.
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking for a good, basic restaurant in the Metrowest area, then you should stop at The Main Street Café. This restaurant, located in Medway, Massachusetts offers something for everyone. Plus it’s almost impossible to leave Main Street hungry since the portions are so generous and you get so many things with your entrée. Expect to come home with a doggie bag.
If you’re anywhere near Medway, a stop in at The Main Street Café is well worth it.
Recommended:
Yes
Kid Friendliness: Yes
Vegetarian Friendly: No
Notes, Tips or Menu Recommendations You can get as much bread as you want
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