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ATELIER THUET

153-171 East Liberty St., Toronto. 416-603-2777

Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $180.

It should be so easy. Marc Thuet, the badass Alsatian with the bleached-blond spikes and ever-present sunglasses, cooks better than just about any other chef in town, and most of the time you get the sense that he cares more too.

In a city that has never been great for bread, Thuet bakes his own, and the results - from crunchy, tangy, rustic, perfectly developed sourdoughs to dense, gorgeous ryes and even pastries - are some of the best you can buy, not only here, but anywhere.

The chef is fanatical about procuring the best ingredients possible and he famously goes to extraordinary lengths to get them.

And Thuet, who recently opened this tiny, cheery bistro next to his takeout and traiteur operation in Liberty Village (he also runs an eponymous restaurant on King Street West and provides much of the menu for the city's two Cluck, Grunt & Low barbecue joints), is a control freak. He is known to yell and to swear colourfully, poetically, sometimes hilariously, and often in several languages.

Say what you want about modern manners, but yelling and swearing are assets in great kitchens, especially as more and more high-end chefs, stretched between multiple operations, do less cooking and a lot more managing. Our city needs more screamers. We'd all dine much, much better as a result.

Atelier Thuet needs more screaming. I have no doubt that if the chef had the kind of frustrating, underwhelming experiences I had there recently, he would do a lot of screaming. He would invent whole new ways of swearing too.

First, the good. The chef's Chinese-style steamed buns, for instance. He stuffs steamed bread with belly of pork that has been raised by a Mennonite farmer near Stratford and fed the whey from cheesemaker Ruth Klahsen's operation. I've rarely tasted better pork. It's crispy and tender and slathered in hoisin and toasted peanuts and topped with carrot and pickled cukes. The serving, with its $12 price tag, is easily large enough for lunch for two.

Thuet's charcuterie plate is my new favourite by far. Prepared by Dragan Markovic, the chef's young, enthusiastic charcutier, the platter arrays a dozen handmade meats, including sublime pork kassler, stuffed pork belly, smoked venison, a rabbit terrine, two nearly translucent slices of fatty, flavourful, spectacular head cheese, and even a pair of pink, pickled quail's eggs. I can think of few finer plates for sharing over after-work drinks.

On my first visit, we order the $25 fillet of halibut, seared hot and fast, seasoned with salt and pepper and sided with basil mashed potatoes, roasted tomatoes and tiny, red roasted beets that are so deeply, lusciously caramelized they taste like butterscotch. (I would bet money that Thuet slow-roasts them over hardwood.)

But the service on that first visit is glacially slow - it takes more than 10 minutes to get a cocktail. You don't get the sense that the service staff, though friendly, know much about the food or the wine; one server pronounces the "W" in gewurztraminer. And the pastry on Atelier's pistachio choux tastes as if it has been sitting around for a day too long.

A second visit is far, far less impressive. Thuet's menu bears an admirable list of imported beers, from Samichlaus, which is one of the rarest on earth, brewed in Austria only on Dec. 6 of each year and aged 10 months before bottling, to Belgium's dark, delicious Gouden Carolus Cuvée Van de Keizer. But when asked to describe them, the server draws a blank and can't be bothered to go and find out. (My tablemates order Kronenbourg instead - and on the second round the server forgets to bring it.)

The excellent charcuterie takes more than half an hour to arrive this time - even though there aren't more than four or five tables seated in the restaurant that night. (That said, Les Biches, Claude Chabrol's 1968 sexy art-house flick, is playing silently on the twin televisions above us, which keeps our table more than a little bemused.) The pricing feels random for some items: Though the charcuterie platter is $30, a three-inch-high "tower" of heirloom tomatoes (the slices add up to about one third of a fruit) and two (albeit beautiful) slices of cheese costs $16.

And what happens with our halibut this time around is inexcusable. My two non-foodie tablemates notice it first: the plate smells like ... fish. Memories of Kensington Market on a hot August afternoon. Not quite wretchedly bad, but not good, either. Most definitely not what a $25 piece of halibut at the restaurant of one of the city's best chefs should taste like. The kitchen cooked the kishkes out of it, but even that doesn't help. We leave half of the fillet on the plate and tell the server. (And to be fair, we didn't complain when she asked us at first - we were all too busy looking at each other's pained, polite faces and wondering, "Do you smell what I smell?") She seems concerned and promises to tell the kitchen. But what she doesn't do is take the fish off our bill. She comps a $7 dessert instead.

We don't yell, we don't swear. Most restaurant customers don't. They shouldn't have to. That's what the chef is supposed to do.