Orrery - meh cheapo menu

It has been a straight back-to-London reality foodwise for me since I got back from Africa, mainly because Emily is about to leave London, and we are helping her eat round London as much as possible. Well, that's my excuse anyway. There is also the helpful fact that the recession is still here, which means lots of top restaurants are doing some ridiculous deals right now to get footfall.

Orrery has been our second stop already this week, which is currently doing a £25 for 3 courses offer via toptable. It is situated on one of my favourite streets in London, Marylebone High Street, and I have always wanted to go given its good reputation. However, it lost its Michelin star a few years back, and I'm not convinced it's doing too well. Although we were there on a Tuesday, it was more than half empty, and I suspect most were there for the cheapo menu.

I will spend a paragraph talking about the space. We ate in the main restaurant, but there is an even more attractive terrace upstairs, which you can peek into, and feels very exclusive. However, I liked the main room well enough, even if the decoration is a little bland. The thing I like best were the windows - the restaurant is named after Charles Boyle, the 4th Earl of Orrery, who also had a mechanical device depicting the positions of the planets of the solar system named after him. The windows are round, and open out like a globe, very pretty. No carpets, but lots of soft furnishings with sofas means its relatively quiet.

The cheapo menu had decent choice, with 3 starters, 3 mains, and 3 desserts. Given the limitations, the choices were generally quite inoffensive, but given that I was in a group of Chinese people, we all more or less plumped for the seafood options. But a nice surprise was that even on the cheapo menu, there was an amuse bouche - a little cup of tomato soup with olive jelly, quite spicy and bloody mary-esque:

Four out of five of us went for the seafood tortellini in a seafood veloute. I'm always a sucker for seafood / pasta / soupy combinations, my only criticism was that it was 2 tiny tortellini, whereas I could have easily polished off a whole main course sized plateful of it:

All of us went for the fish du jour, a pan-fried seabass with cauliflower, girolles, and a champagne foam, which was very competently executed if probably a little uninspiring. But again, the portion size was tiny tiny. There really was not a lot of fish on the plate, and you got 2 girolles, a squirt of cauliflower puree, and a teeny cylinder of potato. You do get lots of coriander fluff though, which they seem very fond of here:

There was also a little pre-dessert of blueberry moussey stuff on top of jelly stuff, with a bit of lime sprinkly stuff on top. One thing we observed was that their dessert chef seemed to have a very tart palate - the lime sprinkly stuff was tear-jerkingly sour, as was the passion fruit sorbet that one of us had for their dessert. Given that I don't have a sweet tooth, I quite liked this:


The dessert choices were actually very good - a blueberry frangipane with blueberry sorbet, blackberry souffle with fromage frais sorbet, or you can just get a plate of sorbet. However, by this time, they had cleverly wheeled the cheese trolley over, and the waft of cheese and the ridiculous choice quickly swayed me. There were literally about 50 cheese on that trolley. And they were very generous with it too - I only really wanted about 3 soft and stinkies, but ended up with a much more diverse and full selection, including comte, camembert, ewe's milk cheese and a goat's cheese:

However, this was also the first time that I knowingly had some fourme d'ambert (because normally I'm more than a little tipsy by the time i get to cheese). It has easily elevated itself to be my cheese of the moment - a lovely cross between a creamy gorgonzola and a more tangy stilton, but there is a little something extra about it. Dave informs me that they inject vouvray wine into it as the mould forms, which probably explains why it's addictive. Anyone know of a good decent supply of the stuff?

All in all, not bad for a cheapo menu, although I'm not sure it really gave them a chance to showcase what they can really do. I had gandered at the full a la carte menu on their website (£43 for 3 course), and I particularly liked the sound of 'lobster, lobster, lobster, lobster', which was one of the starters. I also would have preferred that they skipped the pre-starter/pre-dessert and just gave slightly bigger portions of the actual courses.

And to complete the review for GUers, the bathrooms were lovely (lovely branded toiletries that I didn't recognise, not Molton Brown, and not stolen), and comfortably 2 hour chairs.