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Centro by the Hill

156 Jozo Weider Blvd., Collingwood, Ont. 705-445-2718. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $150.

Oliver & Bonacini

Westin Trillium House, 220 Mountain Dr. 705-444-8680. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $150.

Three Guys and a Stove

190 Jozo Weider Blvd., 705-446-3595. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $150.

When Intrawest (the company that developed Whistler and Mont Tremblant) built a snazzy new village at Blue Mountain, they gave Ontario its own mini-Whistler. Which required something better in the gustatory department than beer 'n' pizza. Enter scions of three successful restaurants: Centro, Oliver & Bonacini, and Three Guys and a Stove.

Centro in Toronto works, from the perspective of service, because Armando Mano prowls the floor, works it like a dog, the way Franco Prevedello did before him, and in the same style as the maestro.

Armando makes it his business to know the big players who frequent Centro, but he never forgets the little guy. He gets to know us too, because, to him, every customer is a good customer.

But do they know that at Centro by the Hill in the Blue Mountain Village? Not one server we encounter seems to have an ounce of Armando's passionate commitment to hospitality. Do they care, as he does, if we're happy? Does he know how to train them to do that? It's not looking that way.

Armando meets your eyes, he stops by tables to chat, he earns his clientele, one table at a time. At Centro-lite there are certain drolleries, such as people stomping into the place in their ski boots and goggles, but when a suit does a drive-by at just under the speed of light toward the end of our dinner, it's hard to believe he cares. By the time he is done intoning: "How was your dinner?" he's pushing off with his back foot, past our table.

Servers show a similar lack of interest. Who ordered what is immaterial to who gets it, and one feels as if one could (should?) be dining at The Keg. (Minus the "Hi, I'm Tiffany and I'll be your waitress tonight.") Sad to say, the food goes down the same road as the service.

We can't figure out how this is Centro - the sharp, precise flavours and the smooth friendly service of the original are nowhere to be found on the hill. Those who can produce good stuff can't necessarily replicate it. The Centro partners can't be in two places at once.

The menu is down-scaled from home base Centro. Some stuff is good comfort food. They make sweet crab cakes and marvellous tomato and mozzarella salad with varied tomatoes and unusually fresh mozzarella in a sweet balsamic dressing. Who could screw up tuna carpaccio? Big beefy burger is après-ski heaven. Same deal with big tender pork chops and veal Parmigiana - deep-fried crispy veal scallop topped with tomato and mozzarella.

But who needs thin minestrone, or onion soup with the acrid taste of powdered base, or lobster risotto with lots of lobster but no taste, overcooked mac and cheese (no bite in the sauce) and horribly overcooked black cod and roast chicken?

The dessert menu says Desserts by Chocolate Lily, and the server admits that they're made elsewhere. They taste ... unfortunate. A skier has to be very hungry to chow down the leaden pastry in the lemon tart, or the thick indelicate profiteroles, or the ho-hum cheesecake.

This is not careful cooking; it's homey food that's probably good enough for the foot of the hill. And the contrast with Oliver & Bonacini in the Westin Hotel is painful.

Infrastructure is everything. Peter Oliver and Michael Bonacini lead an organization that excels at training staff to meet consistent high standards of service and to serve good food. Every one of O & B's six restaurants (Canoe, Auberge du Pommier, Jump, Biff's, and Oliver & Bonacini Café Grill in Toronto and now at Blue Mountain) is carefully managed by the mothership and every staff member is trained to get it right. Our server tells us that her staff manual lists Peter and Michael's home numbers for staff to call any time.

Two servers each apologize twice when my pizza arrives 10 minutes after the other entrées. They are on their game. The pizza is thin-crusted, crispy, impeccable. O & B has never been a fine-food operation. They retail fine service and competent food. Like pleasant onion soup built on real stock, salad with good chèvre and fresh basil, perfectly grilled calamari with capers and (good) black olives and nicely cooked scallops with tomato jam atop yellow peas and Romano beans. Smoked chicken and ribs are pleasantly smoky, but the chicken is overcooked.

The third Blue Mountain branch plant, opened this winter, is Three Guys and a Stove from Huntsville. In its pleasant rusticity (fake log cabin siding, leaf motifs) it vibrates at a lower frequency than the other two, which both channel a casual Parisian café. But dinner costs the same. Same market: In winter, the well-off cottager morphs into the well-off skier. Same menu as in Huntsville. We want to like Three Guys, for its commitment to health (lots of veggie items, brown rice), but they make it hard.

Barley soup has that nasty powdered base taste, kissin' cousin to too salty. Otherwise yummy crispy flatbread is ruined by oodles of flavour-free cheap canned black olives. Artichoke and scallop salad has fine scallops, but the promised grilled lemon and lime are AWOL, and the artichokes have the hopeless mushy texture of canned artichokes. Beef tenderloin stew is good meat in acceptable sauce, but the dumplings are appallingly gummy and tough, recalling the flower and water maps of my youth.

This is busy, unfocused food. It brings back the exuberant hippie cooking of the seventies when we threw in everything on the spice rack. As in the grouper, which in addition to being badly overcooked, is garnished with sautéed pecans, grilled pineapple, lemon grass, corn-and-black-bean relish and served with brown rice, (undercooked hard) black-eyed peas and several different roasted veg.

Holy confusion. Same deal with lamb meatballs, which are accompanied by way too many good tastes: chipotle feta, couscous, roasted veg, black olives (the nasty cheap ones), raisins, peaches, cucumbers and yogurt.

And yet the hungry skiers are scarfing it happily. Which just goes to show: Selling food at Blue Mountain is like shooting goldfish in a barrel.