Square Peg Colborne Lane makes its own niche in a round hole city. .

Colborne Lane is the most controversial restaurant in Toronto. That’s a bad thing to be in a city which shrinks from controversy. Toronto is an uneasy blend of Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis’ satire on hometown boosterism) and pc dogma which rejects success unless it’s tied to doing good. Restaurants, one of the most efficient sponges of culture, reflect the dichotomy. Sometimes I wonder how Toronto’s chefs have time to tend to their restaurants - so busy are they cooking for charity.

But Colborne Lane is a restaurant designed for fun. When the chef/owner Claudio Aprile puts puffed amaranth – pigweed!- on the same plate as truffled risotto,you gotta know he has a sense of humour.

Aprile  flirts with molecular cooking, ice cream made in a cloud of nitrogen, and the ‘tude is in your face.  I’m not just going to eat – I’m going to have the Colborne Lane Experience, shared plates juggled by waiters who look so Bay St in their striped shirts,with the staccato delivery of the trading floor.

Then the music! When I hear Aprile say he wants to cook a dish to go with Black Sabbath, my eyes roll back. Music is another controversy. Zoomers hate it but slackers and millennials love it.But atleast it’s Aprile’s aesthetic, not just noise to keep the staff happy.

Am I’m making too much of the generations gap? Consider this: families no longer eat together because everyone has his own taste template.  As there are more and more of us, we’re dividing into more and more groups. The only MOR resto left? McDonalds!

I didn’t get any of these nuances when I reviewed Colborne Lane back in February 2007. I found the cooking confusing. I was also turned off by molecular cuisine. I’d just returned from Madrid where acolytes of Ferran Adria, the Spanish alchemist who created foam as an ingredient, cooked for us. After hors d’oeuvres of handblown spaghetti made from parmesan water, we were given an almost completely inedible dinner comprising plates  of unrecognizeable lumps.

But if I wasn’t crazy about Colborne Lane, my opinion was NOTHING compared to the anger of readers at another critic’s rave review. After l8 months, they were still complaining so much that the review was recanted.

OMG - Only in Toronto! Anywhere else, a  restaurant so loathed would have been shuttered long ago.

But when I return to Colborne Lane, I find it bustling with its key demographic – slackers (30-50). “  Middle class, middleaged, and middle of the road” says Elizabeth my slacker guide for the evening. As for the food – she cries “It’s food porn”. The dishes on the tables are prettier than any picture and display an insouciant assurance. The service as before is crisp. Ditto the wine list, we enjoy a Bordeaux, Ch. Franc-Cardinal, $65.

Elizabeth and fellow slacker Toque, who stirred sauces in his time, say nostalgia overwhelmed them when they walked in to hear their favourites, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and U-2. I am not too keen on Bono, the lead singer of U 2, the billionaire in the raptor shades who has the audacity to ask me to send money to Africa even though he doesn’t do so himself.

Luckily, a greater decision looms. Which plates to share? I go along to get the full CL experience – although I wanted the enticingly silken lobster salad with saffron aioli all to myself. As we order, we see that while Aprile uses many molecular cooking techniques, he isn’t just another wannabe Adria. He configures his plates like jigsaw puzzles, influences drawn from everywhere.

We all like the beef crudo puzzle with artichokes, piave cheese and pickled mushrooms but I have a little trouble finding the pieces  of the raw tuna salad – only the yuzu semifreddo, a citrusy icy cream stood out among the ginger, sesame, smoked roe and shiso. The Beet gallimaufry, rounds of deep earthy flavoured beets with a lovely grainy texture, gets high fives, particularly the little goat cheese beignet and a sweet beety sponge cake.

WE move on to the heftier plates. Toque goes for the triple seared beef tenderloin with a braised beef rib –  I go for the accompanying a tiny parsley root tart with a quail egg’s yolk sous vide. I don’t know what cooking this tiny yolk in plastic for a couple of hours actually does – all I know is that I bite into a firm yet soft yolk that slips down a treat. Toque is not so happy with the beef which he finds a tad tough. Roast rock hen on the other hand is admirably moist – but the dish’s other components dribble away – great truffle risotto but a little too liquid.

There is one recurring flaw  – timid tastes. The duck confit wrapped in an apple gelatine sheet is excellent but the gorgonzola gnocchi are wimps. Smoked bacon foam which comes with the beef only smells of bacon, and I had to check that it is parsley root in the enchanting little tart.

Paradoxically, the desserts are fragrant with flavours. A lipsingeing green tea citrus sorbet, a plate of intense lemon delicacies including Aprile’s frozen lemon pearls, a lemon verbena sorbet and a spin on banana split, a crackly glazed raw banana.


When we call for the check the restaurant is in full hum - the long communal table is packed with shirtsleeved bon vivants – and we have a little trouble talking above the noise.

We leave before l0 pm which I seem to remember is the witching hour when the resto turns into a pumpkin er bar.

*** Colborne Lane,45 Colborne St. 416.368.9009. No wheelchair access. Dinner for two, Music. Noise just conversation proof. food plus tax:$140