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| - Poor me for believing that this would be a good place to catch a playoff game! Jack Astors appears to be a victim of the bigger-is-better approach to Toronto bar and grill type dining. There are TVs everywhere in the bar area, which is admittedly OK for watching sports, but it's LOUD - patron noise plus banging music plus TV sport-commentator sound that ends up barely being audible meant I had to positively yell at my dinner companions all night. It's too expensive and huge to be a pub, but too raucous and sleazy to be a restaurant.
The menu is really huge and similarly unfocused, featuring the absolute chain-diner gamut of burgers, salads, fried stuff, wings and sandwiches, pizza, pastas, steaks, decidedly "meh" eastern-hemispheric dishes like Pad Thai and butter chicken (I had the Pad Thai, which was flat, bland and really only redeemed by a large dose of sriracha) - much like Janna S.'s review, I couldn't figure out what the restaurant was aiming for other than the broadest possible attempt to appeal to people who want their food to have a theme rather than a flavour.
And another thing: for such an oversaturated, underwhelming place, it's expensive! I paid forty dollars by the end of the night for my blah meal and two beers on tap (though these were decent - Sapporo, fresh and cold) when at other pubs around town I could have easily paid that much to cover meals and drinks for two people.
I have absolutely no reasons to want to come back here, but if you're completely in need of a generic bar and grill meal (whatever the "theme") with no surprises whatsoever and provocatively dressed servers, Jack Astors' chain pedigree will make it happen in a flash.
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