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Le Pain Quotidien

508 Eglinton Ave. W., Toronto 416-485-3000. Lunch for two with wine, tax and tip, $45. No liquor licence.

If the opening of Toronto's first Le Pain Quotidien (on Eglinton Avenue west of Avenue Road) is anything less than the second coming, I'd be surprised. From day one, the place has been mobbed. Lunchtime is a maelstrom of yummy mummies with perfect hair, buff bodies and the occasional Porsche of strollers. The backdrop is perfect, for Le P.Q. is the perfect faux French farmhouse. One almost expects to climb rickety wooden stairs to an attic bedroom with duvet cover by Au Lit and bathroom by Ginger.

But, three meals in, I remain hopelessly confused, and my question is this: Where does Forest Hill wear its taste buds?

Even little things like granola, they flub: Their homemade granola has the big unchewable chunks of cereal that somebody forgot to stir whilst baking. Other breakfast offerings are better (croissants and pain au chocolat being properly flakey), but our mochaccino and hot chocolate both arrived less than lukewarm, and by the third week the people working the cash are still trying to figure out how to use a Visa machine.

Did Le P.Q. really think they could come to Toronto, open four cafés (yes, three more coming soon, on Yorkville, Bay Street and in Thornhill) and take the town by storm? The Belgian bakery/café chain has 80 restaurants around the world. Chain founder Alain Coumont, who visited Toronto briefly to bless the new café, said his cafés serve "poor food for the rich." Too true.

The menu majors in salads and sandwiches. Some days the self-proclaimed fab farmhouse bread is good, some days it's dry. The sandwiches are questionable at best: Chicken curry salad sandwich would be okay if one could locate the chicken in it. Same for the so-called "grilled chicken Cobb salad" wherein the chicken is AWOL, the bacon is mostly soggy, and there is way more lettuce than anything else - not exactly the Cobb salad of my dreams.

Dressings are questionable: The honey-mustard vinaigrette on berry and snap pea salad (again almost all lettuce) is too-sweet pale yellow cream, and the salsa dressing on shrimp salad is cinnamon-spiked cranberry - way too sweet to put on a salad. The shrimp taste just slightly off, and they've been sliced in half lengthwise - a tacky trick to save money.

Real men eat quiche, but they'd be foolish to eat this one. When you reheat quiche, bad things happen to what ought to be crispy crust with cloud-light cheese custard. Both quiches (lorraine and veg, eaten on two different days) have greasy flaccid crust (just like mine when I nuke it the next day) and the filling has fallen. Could this be thanks to the chain's central commissary near York Mills and Leslie? The server tells us that everything is cooked in a central kitchen and then brought here and assembled or heated. It tastes that way too.

They do soups. Often it's a gazpacho that hits about five out of 10 on the Toronto gazpacho scale, thanks to slight blandness and no vegetable chunks. One day they offer great-tasting lentil soup, which is so thick it's more of a stew. Having worked my way through the menu, the only items I'd ever eat again are the lentil soup/stew and the nice thick open-faced roast beef sandwich.

The desserts look pretty and are certainly the place's calling card, but you know the old expression about a book and its cover. Dark chocolate espresso tart has way too much espresso - not a frequently heard plaint from an espresso addict such as myself. Buttery tart has enough sugar to make my teeth hurt, and lemon tart has the too-tart bite of ReaLemon rather than the citric silk of homemade egg-based lemon curd. Raspberry tart is spoiled by a huge river of too-sweet raspberry jam, and mixed berry tart has a custard base that is too light and lacks taste, as if instead of building a proper crème patisserie on a foundation of eggs and milk, they have perhaps used a short cut. As if the fillings were not sad enough, the tarts have crust that is neither super-tender nor flaky.

Almond meringue is a gracelessly big hunk of overly sugary meringue embedded with a few almond shards (not toasted). Hardly a good idea in a town that has known Dufflet's toasted almond meringue torte for two decades. Same too-sweet problem with Belgian waffle and Belgian brownie.

And yet the people are flocking. Will Forest Hill put up with such bad food? Do people know the difference? Or care? Could they be bedazzled by the room? For it is dazzling, a tall room flooded with light from huge skylights. There's one old brick wall with a weathered barn door piercing it, one wall of faux old plaster finished in a mustard colour with a tall stone fireplace. The tables are naked wood with fancy-schmancy sea salt and peppercorns in glass grinders, and bottles of extra virgin and balsamic. All the signifiers of gourmandizing are present. But it's hollow. Le Pain Quotidien is McDonald's with a French accent.