Boston hardly suffers from a shortage of Italian and Italian-American restaurants. In fact, it’s got an entire neighborhood devoted to them: The North End, the city’s Little Italy. But that doesn’t mean the recent opening of Orfano is just another drop in the bucket of red sauce. If fact, it’s quite the opposite— because it comes to us from one of Boston’s best chefs, Tiffani Faison, she of the James Beard Award nominations and the Top Chef and Chopped appearances.
With the new restaurant—which opened in late-summer 2019, back in the Fenway neighborhood—Faison says she wanted to “flip the script” of the stereotypes of mid-century red-sauce joints, many of them antiquated if not downright misogynistic. “Women in the kitchen, women taking care of men,” she says. “What if the women were the gangster and the women were the chefs?”
Orfano's entrance "Leave the guns, take the cannoli"
To that end, she’s empowered both herself and her nearly all-female kitchen team to hold on to some traditions and get rid of others, “taking dishes we love apart and then putting them back together,” she says. Consider, for example, a piccata entree that sees monkfish standing in for the expected chicken or veal and adds miso and sake lees to the usual lemon, capers and parsley. Or an antipasto that reimagines juicy shrimp cocktail as a composed dish featuring a fennel-tinged, vinaigrette-style take on cocktail sauce—no using your hands to dunk crustaceans in a cloying, ketchup-y dip here.
Playing with traditions further, she’s decorated the rather formal but entirely unfussy restaurant with portraits of powerful Italian women, from Sophia Loren to Lady Gaga. These adopted matriarchs look out over a dining room featuring classic velvet banquets, where—in another throw back—servers in bowties and dinner jackets or suits and ties, both male and female, prepare martinis tableside from a cart.
Lobster Bucatini - Rich Brown Butter Lobster Sauce, Freshly Shucked Lobster, Basil & Chili
If Orfano comes as a bit of a surprise to fans of the chef—who, to her knowledge, doesn’t have any Italian blood in her and hasn’t spent a ton of time in Italy—it shouldn’t. She’s made a career of surprises, and has always jumped between cuisines. After starting out working in the Boston-area Italian and Mediterranean kitchens of Todd English, she went on to open the city’s BBQ-centric Sweet Cheeks and Southeast Asia-celebrating Tiger Mama, both to much acclaim.
But she‘s always pined for Italy, too. “I felt like I was missing my left arm,” she says, adding that Orfano “feels like a homecoming for me. It just feels really natural.”
Tiffani Faison