The menu is not revolutionary— I spot the usual bistro suspects alongside some modern tapas-sized dishes. It’s all rather predictable, yet prices are fair, and so pleasant is this low-lit space – with its votive candle-lined walls and gentle buzz coming from a room half-filled with a scenesters – that I’m eager to get munching.

Despite their "free-form" claims, the servers smartly arranged our random picks into courses, graduating from small plates - starting, for good example, with the "personal sized" seared tuna topped with a dab of saffron and lime broth. The Caesar salad is so ubiquitous on the bistro landscape, it’s hard to imagine that it was once a cutting-edge dish. Yet it was, and because of its success, every restaurant offers it on the menu. But the Harbord Room version holds its own. Served slightly de-constructed with house-cured Niagara prosciutto, the dressing thick and creamy and the cheese shreds, plentiful.

Vitiello combines the suggestion of horseradish cream with lime to add a new wrinkle of flavour to citrus-cured salmon, nicely paired with a little fennel salad. The leg of lamb (from Dingo Farms), slathered with lamb jus, is plated alongside sweetly seasoned cauliflower and slick buttered and slightly braised Swiss chard. The lamb is lean and intense, with herby pan drippings that make everything on the plate – even the Swiss chard, which, in the hands of the Vitiello, this natural militancy is wrung out and somehow coaxed into harmony - even better.