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COLBORNE LANE

45 Colborne St., Toronto.

416-368-9009. Dinner for two with

wine, tax and tip, $300.

Iremain confused about Colborne Lane. When it opened in early 2007, I gushed praise for the iconoclastic cooking and lavished rose petals in chef Claudio Aprile's path for his wild creativity and delectable forays into molecular gastronomy.

And then I got hammered, pretty frequently, over the past year by angry readers who had dropped $150 a head there on the strength of my review. They had suffered mediocre service, inconsistent (and often insufficient) food and dinners that took hours to arrive. 'Tis often thus: that I doom a neophyte restaurant with my praise by causing it to be overwhelmed with more business than it can cope with.

Most restaurants recover from being overwhelmed after a month or two, but the complaints about Colborne Lane have only slightly tailed off. How can I counsel readers to drop $300 for two if they might not have a great dinner?

Today, Aprile is the most interesting chef in town (since Susur has closed) and the most gastronomically ambitious. What other chefs garnish raw tuna with a semifreddo of yuzu and "frites" made from thinly sliced nori? Who else can pull a beef tenderloin off the fire three times to dip it respectively in soy, salt and sake without overcooking it? That's the upside.

The downside of Aprile's creativity is that sometimes he's like the tragic hero in a Greek drama whose greatest gift becomes his tragic flaw because he takes it too far. As pride becomes hubris, Aprile's forays into molecular gastronomy sometimes feel like gimmickry over taste, as in his popped corn soup with ham hocks using freeze-dried corn and brown butter powder. The waiter pours corn chowder from a small pitcher into the soup bowl and - shazam - a puff of smoke rises thanks to the corn that has been freeze-dried with liquid nitrogen. But after the smoke clears, what's in front of me is a bowl of not-very-sweet corn chowder with freeze-dried corn that is somewhat dry and hard.

And what about the puffed flatbread "buttered" with smoked red-pepper jam and sunflower and pumpkin seeds? Cool idea, but the taste is MIA. Same for his almost too-clever play on beets in many guises: This is just too much beet and too intellectual an approach to the taste of things. There are red- and yellow-beet vinaigrettes with a sheet of red-beet gelatine draped on top of them. There are dots of intense red-beet mousse and a red-beet sponge, a fuchsia doughnut that tastes like a cross between a beet and a sponge cake. The fab-tasting little goat-cheese fritter and the almond milk foam on the side are grand, but so many elements on one plate!

One evening, our waiter was in too big a hurry to answer our query about arancini, fried balls of rice, so we did the unthinkable and ordered one. This big loaf of a thing had the consistency and savour of yesterday's rice. Crispy wokked squid with caramelized peanut, Asian pear, green peppercorn, Chinese sausage and mango was also unfortunate - too sweet and not so crisp.

Chef's infatuation with molecular gastronomy sometimes clouds his judgment. The waiter arrives with a big stainless steel bowl of liquid nitrogen from which smoke rises. He pours in something creamy and stirs it with a wooden spoon, showing us how it freezes in under two minutes. Five minutes later, he brings it back as a scoop of very ordinary ice cream with chocolate chunks and espresso'd lady fingers: frozen tiramisu. Old.

Naysayers who have never experienced molecular gastronomy at Ferran Adria's El Bulli in Spain or Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck in England tend to assume that it's all smoke and mirrors. But Blumenthal's bacon-and-egg ice cream is the ne plus ultra of flavour, a sweet/savoury creamy/frozen symphony. When molecular gastronomy is used to serve flavour, it's fantastic. And that's what Aprile sometimes delivers.

When he's good, he's very, very good. The tops of his perfectly seared scallops are caramelized for crunch with little dots of flash-frozen crème fraîche that melt in sweet chili dressing with citrus for contrast. His raw tuna salad is a great invention.

Carnivores will be seduced by his raw beef with deep-fried mushroom noodles, artichokes, Piave cheese and piquant pickled mushrooms. Miso-glazed black cod is a cliché, but in Aprile's hands it takes off thanks to a jazzy green onion sauce, sesame panna cotta and roof of crisped tapioca. That beef tenderloin that gets pulled off the fire three times for dipping is served with braised beef rib, smoked-bacon foam and a tiny parsley-root tart with a poached quail egg at its heart. Among desserts, his deconstructed lemon tart is citrus fantasia.

But we're left, after our visits to Colborne Lane, feeling dissatisfied - even more by the service than by the food. In my world, $150 a head buys warm, knowledgeable and unhurried attention. Not like the cheese course at Colborne Lane. When the waiter slaps it down and turns on his heel, I stop him and ask what the cheeses are. He speaks too quickly for us to catch the name of one, so I say: "What is that one?" He says: "It's cheese." Then he adds ignorance to appalling rudeness by calling it "epiosis." Funny way to pronounce Époisses, the great smelly cheese of Burgundy.

If he were the only unfortunate waitstaff at Colborne Lane, we'd be more sanguine. But the service is as inconsistent as the food. Some waitstaff explain what's on each plate; others don't bother. Few of them bother with the warm, attentive part of the service equation. There's a lot of abracadabra at Colborne Lane, but not enough follow-through. Are we in a Harry Potter movie or a fine restaurant?