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Le Papillon on Front

69 Front St. E., Toronto. 416-367-0303. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $115.

I have often wondered what dining out must have been like before modern communications and transportation. How would French ambience and food, for instance, have been prepared around Toronto before the advent of airliner travel and the easy exchange of culinary ideas?

If chefs knew that few diners had ever been to France, couldn't they serve any old thing - steak hâché avec plum sauce, say - and pass it off as Cordon Bleu?

I wondered about this right up until the moment a few weeks ago when I first tried the crepe bourguignon at Le Papillon, the classic city crepe-house-cum-bistro that relocated last month to a flashy, high-end spot on Front Street. While they aren't serving up steak hâché, they are using some of the same old recipes.

Le Papillon first opened in the city in 1974, and diners of a certain age will know its second incarnation on Church Street, where the room, with its faux French country charm, had started looking a little tired. The new location seems intended to persuade a new, more sophisticated audience that the Le Papillon formula is anything but over. The new place has exposed brick walls, lustrous plank floors, windows that stretch to nearly the height of the ceiling, and a partly open kitchen. It now boasts one of the finest restaurant spaces in the city, in fact.

Such ambition. And remarkable how it ends at the kitchen door.

Boeuf Bourguignon as it's supposed to be: boneless beef, brandy, carrots, tomato, red wine, pearl onions, mushrooms, herbs.

My date's crêpe Bourguignon at Le Papillon: three carrot slices, and what tastes like a box of cornstarch, two dozen Oxo cubes and a side of passably tender meat. The crepe is gluey, it's "garnished" with a knot of carrot peelings that the kitchen doubtless thought might look nice, and the inside tastes a lot like Campbell's Chunky Soup.

But my date is the lucky one. I have just had a plate of the broiled escargots - served lukewarm. They tasted dull and vaguely salty, like post-nasal drip. And at least the date doesn't have to face Le Papillon's tourtière. The tourtière shows originality. Its crust is smooth, damp and glossy, looks like shredded butcher's paper and tastes like hydrogenated Brylcreem. The filling? As though somebody forgot to reconstitute the meat.

Everything here sounds better in French. A wedge of something that tastes like tinny chicken salad? Why that must be the rillettes de canard. Mechanically separated poultry faces? That's the terrine de poulet campagnard.

Charcuterie is hot these days. At Jamie Kennedy's Wine Bar, $12 gets you a plate of house terrine, cured duck and gloriously fatty chicken liver mousse. At Harvest, Michael Potters's excellent place in Prince Edward County, a plate of charcuterie - all house-made, of course, and some of the best I have ever tried - rings in at $14.

At Le Papillon, you can get the same - but not really - for $17. "Is this charcuterie made in house?" I ask our server. "Um, yes, all of it is, I think, except maybe for the rillettes," the server says. But the slices of capicolla and salami look and taste a lot like they were purchased in the house of Dominion, the supermarket across the street. As for the rillettes de canard, my first, and as it happens, last taste of Le Papillon's rillettes de canard turns up a piece of bone the size of a chicken beak.

The cake supporting the house's pouding chômeur ("A long-time Papillon favourite!") tastes like petrochemicals. Tarte au sucre arrives oozing from a freezer-aisle-like crust.

Lunch a week later is moderately better. Seafood fettuccine comes in a passably seasoned tomato and roasted garlic sauce. A few fresh herbs would go a long way, mind you - they're five doors down from the St. Lawrence Market and yet at the height of spring the kitchen still finishes its dishes, à la 1974, with a shaker of greenish freeze-dried fluff.

But the pasta's sliced scallops, mussels and tiger prawns are not too brutally overcooked. And my wife, lord bless her, actually enjoys a crepe that's stuffed with curried-lamb-and-raisin stew. We finish with the crêpe banane royale - crispy, potentially fresh-cooked wrapper, a couple of sliced bananas, what tastes like Count Chocula sauce, packaged (or merely stale) sliced almonds and vanilla ice cream. I wouldn't call it "good," but it's good enough.

It's the best crêpe banane royale with stale-tasting almonds that I have ever had.