I was excited to try Ensemble restaurant, newly opened by Chef Dale MacKay, of Canadian Top Chef fame, in the revamped Corner Suite space. Gone are the blue chairs, but otherwise it feels much the same, just a bit warmer with red finishes.

As the former head chef of Lumiere and Canadian media darling, you can perhaps forgive a certain amount of hubris from Dale MacKay. And as the Chef worked the room, I saw some star-struck faces, while the house TVs shamelessly played Top Chef episodes in the background.

The cocktail list is short and interesting, but the ones we tried were too fruity to my taste. The wine list is unpretentious, featuring some decent wines at the $40 level, and some nicer ones at $70+.

The menu is enticing to read and has a fun mix of modern french food, but my excitement was soon put to rest. It was immediately apparent that portion size is preposterous, with most dishes around 4 bites at most, and the price point at an intimidating $12-18 or more per dish. Worse than this, the execution fails to live up to such high billing.

The Hamachi dish ($15) was particularly offensive, with a bit of grapefruit overpowering a tiny quantity of delicate but strangely coloured Hamachi, and a sesame and tofu puree combination that made no sense to me. Not only was the dish not good, at the price it was almost insulting. Do they know that Guu is next door?

The featured spot prawn cocktail dish was tiny and boring, but at least it was pretty and the horseradish cream on top was delicious. I liked the sweet and sour eggplant dish, ($8) and taken from Top Chef, a tiny portion of black cod was nice if unsophisticated with chili, bok choy and cilantro. ($18) The potato gnochhi was a highlight, with rocket and tomato butter sauce, ($10) while the lamb loin was extremely bland, almost tasteless, served with a strangely rich bulgar with black garlic and shiitake. ($24) Moules frites ($18) was average, and we had to ask for bread, which was oily and limp, shocking in a “French” restaurant.

Overall I thought there was a serious lack of acid and the seasoning seemed to be all over the place. The food just wasn’t that good and there wasn’t much of it.

I am sure the service was just trying to be helpful, but they were so attentive that they were annoyingly present and it felt like they were trying to turn our table. And when we ordered a bunch of dishes to share, they started out being served at a nice pace and ended up bringing everything at once, including the Moules, swamping our table and confusing our palettes. Pouring wine, our waitor was “not paying attention” as he poured 3 glasses ranging from small to huge and I was pleased to benefit from the imbalance.

Ensemble should compare themselves to the market and not to the now-defunct Lumiere. You can’t charge those prices for that food and expect to stay in business. The Top Chef novelty will wear off, and in my opinion, unless they make some changes in the direction of the fun and affordable concept I read about (but did not for a second see), they are doomed. Certainly the group I went with will never go back. After spending almost $100 per person we were underwhelmed and still famished and went out into a rainy night to find another restaurant to finish our dinner.