One thing we can say for restaurateurs Joe Hume and Marc Degagne: they sure know how to doll up a dining room. Their Pop Bistro in South Riverdale is a picture-perfect model of the quaint little French bistro it claims to be. The cozy, moody boîte, rich in dark-wood accents and charmed up with a ’50s-era diner counter, seamlessly synchs simple design elements to create a space that’s as elegant as it is casual.

Judged on looks alone, Pop Bistro is a success. Alas, there is that little matter of the food. Let’s just say France would sue if they knew what Pop Bistro was trying to pass off as French cuisine. It’s bad enough that the French onion soup ($9) is merely a bowl of bland, murky hot water with scant onions swimming around a soggy croissant covered with tasteless white goop — but it’s galling to have served it with a confident smile.

Crab cakes ($10) fare even worse: four tiny, inexplicably orange disks are mostly filler and taste like burning. Dim lighting does indeed add a nice atmospheric touch, but it does little to conceal the fact that these cakes are encased in carbon.

There are, thankfully, some redeeming elements of the repast. Though we’re not as impressed as the servers are that this dish has been featured in the Toronto Sun, a beet and chèvre salad ($10) in a port shallot reduction passes muster, despite the fact that the beets, supposedly roasted for four hours, practically require a hacksaw to cut through them.

A terrine aux legume on potato pancake Provençal ($20), though overpriced, is edible. But a more honest menu description would read “pile of grilled vegetables on a half-cooked latke.”

One might consider proceeding with caution when ordering meat. We’re not sure what horrors the cook may have endured at the hoofs of lambs as a child, but his culinary train wreck of a lamb meatloaf ($20) is beyond tragic. It’s dry on the outside, gooey in the middle and inedible throughout. Ditto for a cumin-crusted pork tenderloin ($20), which comes in place of the pork chop we ordered and combines the chewiness of a rubber ball with a shade of way-overdone grey that could double as a swatch from Benjamin Moore.

After enduring countless culinary aberrations, dessert is indeed an unexpected surprise. Monsieur Degagne’s crème brûlée ($6), made using his grandma’s recipe, is inspired.

The new year is young. If this team is to avoid seeing 2008 become a total write-off, they might start thinking about a new line of work — like, say, interior design. Either that or get Grand-Mère in the kitchen, tout de suite.