Kendall Square in Boston Globe Magazine

It’s always good to see city squares getting their just due.  Today Kendall Square was featured as the cover story in the Boston Globe Magazine.

It’s a great article about a number of the newish places that have opened in the square.  Happily, the retail and restaurant infrastructure is finally catching up with all the workers and residents who fill Kendall Square.

I visited one Kendall Square restaurant not too long ago – The Friendly Toast.  The restaurant / diner opened in Kendall in 2009 (I’m a little slow on the uptake) and is wildly popular – especially for weekend brunch.  The decor is wall-to-wall vintage kitsch – all I could think when I saw it was “Wow – I could open a restaurant and have a place to put all my stuff.”

I love the display pictured at right – it’s not a Barbie – it’s a full-size mannequin at the Friendly Toast. It makes a hugely valuable point that people who have the I-can’t-be-bothered-with-cash mindset are missing – credit costs all of us and threatens to put many smaller retailers out of business. There just isn’t enough meat on the bone to survive after Visa and Mastercharge take their sizable cut.  In case you can’t read the sign on the mannequin – the Friendly Toast is paying a whopping $5500 per month on credit card fees.  In self defense they installed a no-fee ATM for customers.

 

The Friendly Toast is at One Kendall Square (don’t you love that kind of address?! – It’s near the Kendall Square Theater, by the intersection of Hampshire and Broadway), Cambridge MA 02139.

Categories: Living Here
Tags: Kendall Square

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2012 at 12:08 am and is filed under Living Here. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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