Olde Jaol Brewing Company

This restaurant is part of the Olde Jaol brewing company but is in another adjacent building which housed an early 19 century jail. The rooms are small with heavy stone walls. This restaurant should not be confused with their adjacent restaurant also called the Old Jaol but is more of a pub with an outdoor patio. This restaurant is the Tavern which is much more upscale with white tablecloths and a upscale menu. The waitstaff is very professional and service is great. I ordered the prime rib with a Cesar salad. The dressing on the salad was just as it should be… I actually tasted anchovies. The prime rib was perfectly cooked. My husband who is a vegetarian called ahead and asked if the restaurant could prepare a vegetarian entrée because they do not have vegetarian options on the menu. The chef made a phenomenal pasta with eggplant and vodka sauce plated very nicely. This restaurant must be the best kept secret in Wooster. The food and service is excellent if you’re looking for fine dining.

Great bar! On tap is really good and a really cool layout (it was a jail). Bar food is good, burgers looked good the wrap I had was fabulous. The have a dining room next do that has Ballist Point on tap. That’s rare.

Nice place to hang out in the summer. Great outdoor patio. The menu has plenty of options and food is made very well. The wings are delicious, but be careful what sauce you get bc it was super hot for me!

They need to bring back the blackened grouper sandwich. This is what brought us back but they took off the menu till summer. Grouper is available year round so don’t know why they would take one of the best items off the menu. I settled for the perch sandwich but was not as good. We will be waiting till summer to go back.
Let me know if it’s back on the menu.

A really mixed experience of very good and very bad. Never go when there is a banquet going on, like last night. We waited two hours for our main course after getting an excellent, but pricey clam appetizer. Our guests mashed potatoes were more horseradish than potato and he had to ask to have his steak replated. He declined a baked potato because he thought it would arrive way too late. No compensation was made on the bill for either the extreme delay or for the inedible potatoes. Only one out of three entrees lived up to the publicity. Not going back.

Good food from a pretty extensive selection. I had the ribs, which were tender enough to fall off the bone. Could have had a bit more BBQ sauce, they tasted great.
Very nice selection of beers, both draft and bottled.
Service was excellent, waitress was friendly, attentive, and knew the menu very well.

Went on a Tuesday evening and had a decent crowd. They had Great Lakes Christmas Ale on tap and it was burger night. We ordered the spinach and artichoke dip as an appetizer, which we order everywhere we go. This was by far one of the better ones we’ve had.
Burger was good, nothing overly impressive but a good meal for the price.
Fun atmosphere in the bar area with TV’s and some cool decorations. Service was really friendly and quick. Would definitely return!

Food was good. I ha the chipotle sirloin and the steak was a good cut but toppings were mediocre. The onion rings and mushrooms were not over breaded and tasted great. Deserts can be shared.

This review is for the bar-​ish side: It may not be the greatest restaurant, but there’s a reason I always seem to find myself here when I’m in Wooster. The food is decent, plentiful and reasonably priced, and I always seem to find something solid on tap. Service is fast and friendly.

We arrived to this bar on a sleepy Sunday afternoon where the only other tables were a birthday party of older women and a father with his young daughter. It was relaxed, service was as expected, and the food was awesome. My friend had the sirloin steak, and I had the new blue cheese burger (large burger, blue cheese, A1 sauce, and fried onion = YUM) but I warn there were no sides with this burger.
Do recommend whole-​heartedly

I mean for a bar type atmosphere, really pretty good. Standard bar foods but really good specials that make that ½ price burger taste really good. Beer specials really good too. Overall nice inexpensive place to grab a bite and a beer. The onion rings are really good.

Decent place, not so good beer on tap, okay atmosphere, service was good, not to busy. Decent for Wooster. Pasta dishes overpriced.

As other reviewers have noted, this is really two different restaurants. The bar/​casual dining restaurant in a single story building and the fine dining restaurant located in the old brick jailhouse next door. Further confusion is added in that the fine dining also has a bar with large booths for dining. We opted for a booth in the bar area as the dining room was deserted! The food was average at best to mediocre. My steak was medium to well done (ordered medium rare), and my friends salmon was decidedly over cooked (and probably frozen at some point). The wine list was very limited and the pricing is quite high. Would not return as we had an excellent meal at City Square Steakhouse the next night.

I ordered the Nutty burger with onion rings and the Caesar salad.
The onion rings are awesome, the Nutty burger was a little nutty but good and the Caesar salad was subpar.
If the dish is not stellar, find another recipe or don’t put it on the menu.
The service was fantastic though and you could tell that everything was freshly made.
This restaurant is another example of Wooster’s Schizophrenic restaurants. I don’t get it. If you want to open 2 restaurants then open 2 restaurants at 2 different locations. Otherwise it is just too complicated to figure out and when people tell other people about the restaurant then they get confused.

Not bad for Wooster. Cool hang out place to grab a beer few appetizers. They fine dinning area is actually pretty nice. I thought the food was overpriced. The mussels were not that great and our main dishes were alright. This is just one of the three «good» places in Wooster. Enjoy.

«Taxidermy Alcatraz»
Why I have a desire to go here is not 100% clear but every time I am in Wooster, it’s always a staple visit.
Posting license plates scripted with punny (pun intended) lettering you can assume this will be comfort bar food at its finest.
The décor is filled with deer heads and other hunting/​sporting/​fishing/​tractoring/​driving/​racing memorabilia.
Large outdoor area that is enclosed for the not so pleasant days.
Please note that as tempting as the nachos look, the cheese comes out of an Ortega cheese dispensing machine. Not yummy.
The staff is always women and they are always very friendly! Place can fill up around lunch time but there is most definitely a table with yer name on it.

If we’re talking about the «formal» dining restaurant, try the City Square Steakhouse, South Market Bistro or the Broken Rocks Café first.
If we’re talking about the patio bar, it’s okay at best. Has one thing you’ll remember; the most uncomfortable bar stools you’ll ever sit in.

I wasn’t too impressed with the tavern. I ordered a BBQ bacon cheeseburger and there was hardly any BBQ sauce. The burger was overcooked, the bread was a little stale so it was hard to swallow. It was still edible so I finished it. The onion rings were pretty good though. Someone with me ordered a harvest cranberry salad and it looked pretty good but her soup tasted canned. Another one ordered the prime rib sandwich and it was overcooked on a slab of garlic bread. Another ordered bbq ribs and he says they were pretty good. My advice would be to don’t come here for food. The service was good enough and I enjoyed the atmosphere.

You could maybe — maybe — get away with calling yourself a «brewing company» yet not brewing your own beer IF you stocked a healthy amount of craft beers on tap. But you definitely can’t if each and every one of your taps is some corporate yeast water.
The food is similarly bland: They do typical pub fare. Nothing wrong with that, except that this is worse than any other pub you’ve visited; e.g. they ignore basic details like that you shouldn’t serve sandwiches on stale bread.

First of all, I’m not sure why this is listed as a brewing company. They don’t brew a thing here and really don’t have that impressive of a beer list at all. We’re relatively new to Wooster so maybe that was the name in the past, but now it’s «tavern and restaurant» not brewing company.
Anyway, after a so-​so first visit, we decided to give the pub side of the Olde Jaol another shot. We’ve decided that this is more of a happy hour and appetizer place than somewhere to get a good meal.
The staff is always really nice, but not always the quickest or most attentive. We found we had empty glasses often and waited forever to get our bill. The patio area outside is nice, too.
I will say, the pretzel bite appetizer is great. We would recommend those for sure.
As for the meals, I got a chicken parm pasta dish — ordered grilled instead of fried chicken. Got the fried chicken anyway. Not happy. The dish was incredibly basic — like anyone could have thrown it together. Penne pasta covered in jarred Alfredo and marinara sauces, topped with two fried chicken strips and shredded Parmesan cheese. It was edible, just not inspired in the least.
My husband ordered the Ruben. This is a favorite sandwich of his and he orders it often when we go out, so he knows his Ruben. The only good thing he had to say about this one was that the dressing was on the side. Otherwise, the bread was undergrilled — just like our son’s grilled cheese — and it also seemed stale. He also got a Caesar salad and ate maybe a third if it. The rest was too soaked in dressing.
I can’t complain about my salad — my dressing came in a packet on the side. Although, on the menu it was listed as fat free ranch, but it was light. Better than regular, but last time I checked 11g of fat did not equal fat free.
Really this place is just so-​so. It kind of feels like they just half-​ass everything. Other than the pretzel bites we’ve yet to find anything we’d order again. We may go back — but not for a while.
It should be noted that we’ve yet to eat at the steakhouse — which has a far better reputation from what we’ve heard.