On Friday night Sarah had made plans to do a girls night out at 28 degrees in Boston leaving me with Madeline. So I decided the night was a perfect time to call in some reinforcements and had Dave and Zoe come over for dinner. Since Lineage, the replacement for Lucy’s opened last week I scheduled us to go out to eat there to check out the new menu at a bistro. Stepanie happened to be in the neighborhood to do her taxes so as Sarah was waiting for her cab expecting the buzzer to call her out for her girls night out people kept arriving at the door. I assured her that the 10 kegs being delivered were not for a party while she was out and she was off for her night out and we were off for a walk around the corner to scout the new cuisine.

I am happy to report that my first experience with Lineage was a positive one. There was ample seating area for Madeline even if we had to park her in the route that the wait staff walk through from the kitchen to the dining area while we waited to be seated. Madeline was happy the whole time falling asleep after fifteen minutes into the wait. We ordered a number of appetizers including tuna tartare, a pizza with porcini mushrooms and truffle oil, goat cheese/mesclun salad with walnuts, and cod cheeks in a sauce that had mini-onions and raisins. I would highly recommend any of the appetizers but I was most surprised by the tomato sauce that the cod cheeks were in. It was tastier than most sauces.
For the main course we split two entrees, a perfectly cooked medium rare steak with cheesy mashed potatoes and those thin string beans that you usually get at a wedding. The steak came with an excellent mushroom sauce. We also got the gnocchi with mushrooms and it was also very interesting with high quality mushrooms in it and a great consistency for the sauce. They offer the gnocchi for about twice the price with lobster but we abstained. Our wine was a Multepulciano that went well with the food. Since we had left room for desert we ordered the chocolate mousse and Pancetta with blood orange sauce and caramel. Both were quite good. I thought the ’smores were a bit of a silly idea for six bucks but some people probably have a different response to the idea of getting a ‘smore. In general I think that Lineage on Harvard street is as good of a bistro as the Washington Tavern and has the advantage of ample dining space and convenience to a nook in Coolidge Corner.

At dinner Dave mentioned that he had found a great Turkish diner tucked away on the street that the police station is on. I had never thought to go there before and had been whining plenty about the lack of a good diner near city hall. Martin’s doesn’t really cut it because it is very cramped and Sarah has some bad memories of morning sickness there. The Turkish place is called something like family diner and had an interesting mix of ethnic Turkish food and standard American style diner fare. I ordered a Turkish breakfast as a mystery foreign food that turned out to be was a sub-par Cobb salad like thing but with Turkish food. It basically was a collection of bread, cheese, feta, cucumbers, and olives with some jam. But Sarah and Amanda ordered eggs that looked like they were satisfactory (despite the mushrooms in Sarah’s omelette coming from a can). It isn’t really a sit-down diner set-up but operates close enough to the Paramount’s breakfast scenario without the big lines and scramble for seats that it is still a very good option.

Having sampled some more foreign cuisines we returned to our home at Zaftigs this morning to find in shock that Zaftigs has taken down the DannyO art that had been there since I can first remember going to Zaftigs. They even took down the painting of a Zaftig. I will miss the art that was there before since I always secretly wanted to get rich and buy the collages of the car, the girl, or the bar mitzvah. All is not lost at Zaftigs for artwork. They replaced the older, large scale, DannyO art with new smaller items by DannyO including a cute series of cars that would look amazing in any child’s room and one of the prudential building at night. I tried to determine what had happened by inquiring with our waitress but she was unable to adequately explain where the older pieces went. She made it seem like all of the pictures in Zaftigs were for sale with a price tag and that DannyO had decided to rotate them. But it wasn’t clear if Zaftigs owned the paintings or the artist owned them or DannyO owned Zaftigs. We also didn’t receive our standard bagel chips with olive sour cream spread which could be an unfortunate indication that Zaftigs has jumped the shark.