Orfano – Okay Food, Bad Service
My spouse and I visited Orfano for dinner on a Sunday
evening in late November 2019. We dined at Chef Faison’s Tiger Mama the evening
before, and we ate at Sweet Cheeks back in May 2017. (See our other individual
reviews of the Big Heart Hospitality Group restaurants.) Orfano is open for
dinner daily. You can reserve a spot using the online Open Table reservation
system.
Orfano opened in 2019 on the street level of the Pierce
Building in the Fenway Triangle area near where Boylston Street meets Brookline
Avenue. We stayed nearby at the Residence Inn Back Bay-Fenway, which is a short
walk from the restaurant. The high-ceilinged space contains two areas: the
elegant bar and the dining room (with its grape-colored padded booths and
stand-alone tables). Décor features lots of wood, zig zag-patterned floors, big
chandeliers and hanging pendant lights, strategically-placed mirrors, and framed
black-and-white photographs.
Orfano serves Italian cuisine with a twist. We ordered the
warm hand-pulled mozzarella as a snack dish. Our server encouraged us to order
some garlic bread to accompany the cheese, but we shy away from the idea that
dishes should be sold as “pieces”; if the chef felt that bread was necessary to
complement the cheese, she would have plated it that way. The restaurant
delivered two long thin crispy breadsticks instead (every table receives
these). The cheese was tasty, but we feel that it would have benefitted from a
sprinkling of sea salt, in addition to the smidge of olive oil that was present
in the small dish. As an appetizer, we shared the salt-and-pepper calamari,
which was served with a dipping sauce; however, the dish consisted primarily of
fried onion petals (which reminded us of what is served at the Outback
Steakhouse [which I’m sure is not the impression Chef was hoping for]) and
fried fennel slices, with just a few meager calamari pieces mixed in. As our
entrees, we ordered two pasta dishes, the cacio e pepe (which consisted of
about seven tortelloni cups rather than the traditional long spaghetti noodles;
this dish was delicious and creative, but it did not remind us at all of cacio
e pepe in any way) and the black pepper maltagliati (squash and maitakes with
pasta that resembled broken pappardelle). Our server warned us that the pasta
dishes were not entrée-sized and were instead intended to be shared by the
table as a mid-course. (She did not lie about the portion sizes; fortunately we
were not starving, or we would have left hungry.) We did not order dessert:
nothing sounded particularly unique except the panna cotta (which sounded
similar to the dessert we had tried but not liked the previous evening at Tiger
Mama). The restaurant delivered two tiny slivers of multi-colored almond cake
as a complimentary sweet treat while we paid our bill. Service was perfunctory;
we seemed like an afterthought because our server was more interested in her
other larger tables that yielded bigger bills/gratuities.
We liked the elegant Orfano space, but the food quality, portion
size, and service left a bit to be desired.
