Painting walls a Pepto Bismol pink might seem a bit in-your-face for a serious restaurant, but it works — like most everything else at Harbord Room. Whether front-of-house master Dave Mitton (formerly of Czehoski, and pictured at left) and chef Cory Vitiello (formerly of the Drake Hotel) are gently poking fun at the stuffier, more high-end boîtes that pepper the lower Annex’s restaurant row is pure conjecture. Regardless of their motives, they’ve taken a pub and given it a refined, yet relaxed elegance.

Beneath coffered ceilings, and atop marble high-top tables, the young chef’s stellar small plates hit the right pleasure centres. (The menu has since seen a season change, so some of the items we tried are no longer available.) His boffo nouvelle bistro may be short on variety, but selectivity is what counts here. The succulently tender calamari ($13), loaded with deliciously smoky stewed tomatoes, gets a judicious dose of fatty heat from house-made chorizo.

A terrine of rabbit and Berkshire pork ($12), studded with pistachios and dried apricot, keeps things hopping in the right direction — a raspberry compote and grainy mustard pass muster for this ménage-à-deux. And a picture perfect east-coast halibut ($14) sits on a mound of super-fresh and meaty mussels, matched with a delicately subtle chili-lime broth.

The first stumble, however, arrives with the mains, specifically a roasted “natural” breast of chicken and sausage combo ($23). The plump and juicy house-made banger is bang on, but an under-seasoned breast of stringy, pinkish poultry flat-lines under a cloyingly sweet purée of sunchoke and apple laced with saffron. The burger ($13) fares far better. On a Fred’s Bread bun, the seven-ounce ground sirloin is a retro throwback to a time when breadcrumbs, eggs and herbs were the gold standard of ingredients in your ground chuck-round recipe. With the addition of some delicious Dingo Farms bacon ($2) to a patty that comes smothered in sharp white cheddar, you have before you one heck of a banquet burger — not to mention perfectly salted frites to dip into a homemade cumin-laced ketchup.

But the meal’s real highlight is fresh papardelle noodles with braised, melt-in-your-own-cheeks beef cheeks ($18), proving once again that rustic cuisine done right never disappoints.

We wish we could say as much for a chocolate walnut bread pudding ($8) that should be mercifully put out of its misery (and has been since our visit). Thankfully, all is redeemed by goat cheesecake with strawberry sauce ($8), which is simple genius. It’s the right ribbon to wrap up an utterly enjoyable experience that’ll leave you, shall we say, tickled pink.