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FORTE

133 Richmond St. W., Toronto

416-867-1909

http://www.fortebistro.ca

$125 for dinner for two with wine, tax and tip

Opening a fancy bistro at Richmond and York Streets is a licence to print money. Even in a recession, you have two captive markets. One is the people heading to the Four Seasons Centre after dinner for ballet or opera - hence the menu at recently opened Forte being divided into categories called prelude (apps), opus (mains) and coda (dessert).

The other is the boys (sic) from Bay Street. Say what you will about expense accounts being eviscerated and jobs lost, but business on the Street continues and those good ol' boys need somewhere to cry in their beer (or vodka). Thursday nights - Bay Street's traditional all-out party nights - are as rockin' as ever. We know that people drink more in bad times.

Hence the beautiful bar at Forte, a triumph of mid-century modernism thanks to high ceilings, a palette of reds, blacks and browns and pouf-like tables. The bar leads seamlessly into the equally lovely dining room. It, too, is very sexy, with cool textures, warm colours and equally high ceilings. The fact that neither bread nor wine arrives until our apps do just gives us more time to admire the rough stone tiles on some walls and sweet little alcove with microfibre wall blocks around one round table.

There seems, in fact, to be only one server, and a 12 top of serious suits is monopolizing him. So we wait. And wait. He is affable but perhaps overwhelmed.

Is the kitchen overwhelmed, too? What other explanation could there be for Forte's wildly inconsistent cooking? Could the problem be chef Greg Argent's double duty? As chef for both Cru in Etobicoke and Forte, he goes back and forth between each.

Was Argent perhaps in Etobicoke the night we ate eggplant tart with arugula and Brillat-Savarin cheese? The tart itself is made with pastry so tough that we can't cut it with a knife, despite working out daily and having pretty good biceps. It is filled with tomato-tasting orange mush, on top of which are slices of completely melted cheese morphed into a liquid. This is a bad thing to do to good cheese. Two vertical slices of dried crisped eggplant are the only positive aspect of this miscalculation.

Roasted artichokes, meanwhile, come with prawn mousse, salt cod brandade, marcona almonds and romescu sauce. This dish is pleasant in a buttery, sophomoric way, thanks to breadcrumbs and cream, the former filling up the artichokes and the latter smoothing the salt cod purée. Intention counts, but execution is everything. In this case, raw untoasted almonds, whatever their pedigree, don't do much. Nor does the slightly bland romescu sauce.

I have seldom met a pasta dish I couldn't eat, but Forte was up to that challenge. Has the pasta in mushroom and blue cheese ravioli been boiled, refrigerated and then reheated? We can't figure out any other way to get pasta to be so tough. If I were going to make a blue cheese sauce, I wouldn't want it to turn out like the acrid liquid on this plate. One wonders if they perhaps bought cheap blue cheese and did not much to it. As for the mushroom filling, it's brown.

Duck breast and confit with truffled lentils is a confit leg so overcooked that it shreds on contact; it is also so oversalted that we're still guzzling water two hours later. The breast meat is nicely pink and tender, but the lentils are undercooked and the jasmine apricot sauce is too sweet.

On that evening, the better part of valour was to stick with the sugar.

The petits fours dessert, for instance, is very cute, especially the tiny lemon mousse with a little cap of gilded meringue, a miniature crispy-crunchy orange butterscotch torte with very well-wrought flavours and an iconoclastic chocolate banana cake made with two distinct layers, one chocolate, one banana. The sole negative is dry white-chocolate pomegranate cake.

As we're leaving, the chefs are in the bar in their whites. Fiddling while Rome burns is a good idea. It has historical precedent.

On another evening, the food is better, but everything is relative. French onion soup dumplings are, the server explains, beef cheeks, Gruyere and rich cooked-down onion soup imprisoned inside Chinese dumpling wrappers, with more Gruyere on top. The Gruyere flavour, though, is MIA, the wrappers are somewhat gummy and the inside is all beef and very little soup.

Soup may be Forte's bête noire: Provencal fish soup is normally a purée of fish with tomato, onion and garlic, neither a thickened nor a cream soup. But Forte's rendition is so thick (because it contains flour?) that, when you run a piece of bread through it, the resulting moat of soup doesn't budge afterward. It's a textural train wreck.

Mains are better. Pot-au-feu is French boiled-beef-and-veg dinner, normally served as meat, veg and broth. We welcome new takes on old faves, so it's all right that they served the meat and veg but no broth. The meat is a perfectly cooked hunk of beef, tender and rich with flavour, and the veg are magnificent: tiny turnips, carrots and asparagus so good that one is able to ignore the brown sauce that seems to have been glued to the plate by heat lamps and the so-called oxtail and potato soufflé that is cutely stuffed into a marrowbone and but is more porridge than soufflé.

Saffron-stained scallops, finally, are perfectly (i.e. barely) cooked, a credible bistro item with nicely seasoned baked potatoes and brown butter vinaigrette. We can't, however, find the promised saffron "stain." Perhaps consistency is not this restaurant's forte?

jkates@globeandmail.com