A View of Linea

I thought it would be helpful to share my vision of Linea with the readers.

Linea will be a small, lively, unique 30-40 seat Italian neighborhood restaurant.  I am hoping to find a space with plenty of street visibility, foot traffic, and storefront windows in one of the following locations:

Jamaica Plain (Centre Street or Hyde Square)
Somerville (Davis or Union Square)
Brookline (Coolidge Corner or Washington Square)
or Cambridge (Central or Inman Square)

The storefront will be a key to Linea's popularity.  Every afternoon, I will make fresh pasta in the storefront windows on top of a long window table.  Streetwalkers will see me making pasta from the sidewalk.  I will hang the long sheets of pasta to dry right in the windows on long wooden dowels.  Those who walk by and appear curious will be invited in - any extra pasta portions leftover from the previous night's dinner will be available for retail sale in a small display case.  

We'll want to provide excellent food and service right off the bat.  If we do that, the restaurant will make good first impressions with the neighborhood folk, and good reviews will follow.  Linea will not take reservations.  With a good location, good reviews, and limited seats, there will be a line of customers waiting outside shortly after we open.

The line will serve as a pre-dinner meeting place, where neighborhood folk will have a chance to chat amongst each other while they wait.  Occasionally, a server will walk outside and pass little nibbles of delicious complementary finger food to encourage people to stay in line.  Linea will have a nice awning to keep people dry in light to moderate rain, and there will be one or two park benches for people to sit down.

In the event of a very rainy night or other bad weather, we will run a "Rainy Day Special" (such as a free soup or 10% off) which we will market live that day on Twitter and Facebook.  We will take reservations for the cold winter months (Dec-Mar), as people will not want to risk waiting in line in the cold. 

The menu will be simple, highly seasonal, and will change weekly.  Everything will be made from scratch in house.  I will shop in the mornings at farmers markets and take pictures of all the beautiful stuff I buy.  As I come up with new menu items based these ingredients, I will post them (and the pictures) on Twitter and Facebook.  Social media will play a key role in marketing for Linea.

The restaurant will have a very open kitchen, and possibly a 6 or 8 seat high-top chef's table right in front of the line.  This will promote interaction between the diners and staff, and the whole restaurant will be lively. 

There will be no paper menus.  The dining room will be painted with blackboard paint, and the food and drink menus will be nicely drawn on the walls in large print.  We will hire local artists (or art students) to do chalk art around the weekly menu, the theme being the ingredients used and the season. 

The meal will start with warm focaccia with good olive oil, and optionally fresh ricotta or lardo to eat with their bread.  The menu will be authentic Italian, not exactly sure which region (if any in particular) quite yet:

Salads, Soup(s), Cured Meats
5 pastas (2 vegetarian)
3 entrees (one meat, one fish, one poultry)
Sides

All dishes will be available in half/whole sized portions (app/entree).  Sharing will be encouraged. 

The wine selection will also be small (also written on blackboard).  We will have exclusively Italian wines, and two wine lists.  One list will be customer and staff favorites, which will all available year-round.  The second list will be a selection of rotating rare and interesting short-production bottles. 

There will be no dessert.  At the end of the meal when the check is presented, each diner will get a small plastic bag with a little complementary sweet of some kind (e.g. choc truffle, meringue cookie).  Stapled to the bag will be a business card for the restaurant, with promotional information or a coupon for next visit attached.

Instead of conventional dessert, there will be a small gelato counter right inside the door, with interesting flavors of homemade gelato and sorbetto available to go.  Diners will see the gelato on the way in (it might be visible from outside too), and will surely want a scoop after dinner on the way out.  During the day time, the gelato will be for sale to the general public. 

Linea will have a very small, tight-knit, enthusiastic staff.  There will be two cooks in the kitchen, two servers in the dining room, and a swing person who will float back and forth.  All will all be very knowledgeable about the food, much more than the average restaurant.  How?

All the employees will be both cooks and servers.  Since the menu will change weekly, the two cooks and two servers will swap weekly as well. 

I can go on all day about the little details, but I hope this gives you a sufficient mental picture of what I am trying to create.

-Chef Wax

(End note: I fully realize that I may not be able to open a restaurant with all of the characteristics described above, this is merely what I am aiming and hoping for.)

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