Joia on Main — Restaurant in Newmarket

Joia on Main is a restaurant we strongly disliked but would like to love in the future.

This place is situated in a superb location with free parking, and plenty to explore before or after dinner. Restaurant is on the first floor of a brand new McMansion building that remotely resembles an Edwardian-era estate house. Design-wise the interior is a fail. The dining room is an eclectic mixture of bad staging decisions. There is not a table in the room that you would wish to sit at when you first walk in. Every spot has some deficiencies that make it less cozy than one would expect from an upscale restaurant.

Joia is a place that aspires to serve Italian family ambiance at premium prices. Very little of that actually gets delivered. The place is not short-staffed but our order was not served promptly on a slow night, neither did we ever get our water refilled or had our table properly set in the first place. No salt or pepper grinders/shakers, no olive oil or vinegar in sight, cutleries were placed straight on a bare table.

The chef obviously has some decent skills but the final results disappoint. For the appetizer we had grilled squid. Very nice texture, great flavour, tasty morsels of perfectly roasted garlic and other garnishes. Each individual piece was great on its own. However, a combined spoonful of everything on the plate was nothing more than a conflicting cacophony of confusing flavours. I finished the plate by enjoying each individual ingredient on its own.

My wife had salmon. She didn't like it. It was too spicy and the heat interfered way too much with what was on the plate.

When I skip a pasta dish then I judge an Italian restaurant by how well they make their pizza. I've made a few pies of my own in the past. Probably not many more than five thousand of them but enough to recognize a great pizza when I get one. Joia's pizza was literally one of the worst pizzas I had ever had anywhere in the world. Such a pie served anywhere in Italy may constitute a criminal offense. The dough tasted like bland chalky sponge and had the texture of rain-soaked cardboard. The sad toppings were sparse and lonely. However, my biggest disappointment with the pizza was that it was served to me burned. It was not because Joia claims to serve their pies well done. A pizza served to me was a soggy burned piece of culinary failure made of out of a dollar worth of subpar ingredients for which I paid fifteen bucks. Come on Joia, making a decent pizza is not hard at all. Source some Antimo Caputo "00" flour, and change your in-house recipe for something that actually will be enjoyed by your patrons. You got a proper pizza oven. You have a dedicated staff member who makes and looks after the pizza. Put some real effort in fixing this area of your menu. Greatness awaits!

Looks like the owners splurged on high-end fixtures and finishes but failed to get a decorator with some real experience and vision. The dining room begs for rearrangement. Joia, consider adding a few half-wall dividers to make the place cozier. Also put a nice closed hostess station between the tables and current open-to-everyone serving area. There's no good reason for your customers to see how your waitresses recycle previously-served ramekins filled with your family's secret recipe of pepper-infused oil. That's just cheap and unsanitary. If you want to continue this practice please be a bit more discreet about it, and introduce a process to make it more hygienic.

Lastly, the wine list did not inspire us at all. The options available to a family couple out on a date night are limited. Some affordable but decent house wine on offer will likely increase your overall liquor income. What was offered to my wife with the salmon dish sadly didn't pass the taste test.

As it stands now we have no desire to return to this location...

I would like to start off by acknowledging the difficulties that most restaurants, and restaurant staff have faced over the past year and a half, which is why my wife and I were excited to finally be able to celebrate our second anniversary, as our first anniversary was spent in quarantine. We decided to stay local due to the unpredictable weather this past Tuesday and decided to try Joia on Main St. for the fact that they have a covered patio, as well as a generally nice ambiance. We waited for about 45 minutes in the rain… which was totally fine and we had an umbrella and figured there would be a wait. When it was our turn to be seated, we noticed an empty table right at the edge of the patio that looked as though it was vacant for a while due to it’s exposure to the rain, along with 2 other tables which were further underneath the covered patio. When the hostess told us to take the table that was right at the edge and exposed to the rain, my wife asked if we could perhaps have one of the other tables in the drier section (which were empty). Up until this point, everything was as we’d have expected from going out to dinner for our special night. The hostess/waitress’ response to my wife’s inquiry was like nothing I have ever experienced before at a restaurant…. Never and I mean NEVER have I been treated with outright disrespect and rudeness. I understand that working in the service industry can be stressful when dealing with all different types of people and we all have our days when we aren’t feeling 100%, and throw in the stress of the past year and a half and some slip-ups are understandable. The hostess/waitress reminded my wife that “you will take whichever table is ready for you” and when we pointed to the available tables which were dry, she said “I can’t switch tables, and if you don’t like it YOU CAN LEAVE!”. We were not rude in any sense of the word when asking if switching tables was a possibility, this was a totally shocking response from the hostess/waitress so much so that the table nearest to us even referred to it as “absolutely disgusting behavior”. We politely asked to speak to a manager after this totally OUTRAGEOUS exchange. When the manager came, he was nice and understanding and seemed to also be taken aback by his employees’ attitude, and the neighboring table also chimed in and let him know how incredibly rude she had been with us. He told us that we would find us a different table and offered us a drink in the interim as we waited for a new table. After making sure he sat everyone in line, he found us a dry table. He served us for the remainder of our dinner, in a very lackluster fashion. He didn’t bring us water, when clearly other tables were offered water, and the general mood from his seemed rather sour AT BEST. We ordered a bottle of wine and an appetizer along with two pasta dishes. The food was adequate: good but not great… but it didn’t matter because my wife and I were enjoying each other’s company and trying our best to make our anniversary special. We have all had less-than-exceptional experiences at restaurants and in my experience, a good restaurant will always try to go above and beyond in order to make up for even the slightest hint of a hiccup on their end. Which makes it most astonishing to discover that when the bill came, we were charged in full for everything… I would have thought that the words “I’ll take care of you guys and im sorry for that…. can I get you a drink?” would have meant the at the very least, our first drinks in which he offered us would have been covered but NOPE. We paid the $200 bill, we even tipped without question. I Can honestly say that our experience last night was utterly terrible and I cannot, in good conscience recommend this place to anyone...

First visit, and I had such high hopes but left disappointed.

Next to location, presentation is the strong suit in both decor and plating but that's where it ends. Suffice to say, the experience fell flat for us. Food was just okay (and overpriced). Service was disorganized; we kept getting different servers at first then we were forgotten about after appetizers, although the place was only half full, if that. It was not even 4pm although it was Father's Day - hadn't even hit dinner rush yet. Ordered two appies and asked for the wine list. Appies and wine list came but neither my wine order nor our entree orders were ever taken.

Bruschetta was a modernized take on the old fave which fits the vibe here, but lacked the flavour punch I'm used to on this classic dish. It was nice but not out of this world. This pizza style bruschetta was less messy to eat but we prefer the traditional chopped style and with more garlic and basil.

Calamari allá griglia was drowned in a lacklustre olive oil, and while very tender, the dish was overall, quite bland, aside from the bitterness of the charred edges competing for dominant flavour, with some of the most bitter olives I have ever had. Someone else may love this dish, but no one at our table enjoyed it; it was barely "ok" and for the price, well, we weren't impressed beyond the lovely plating.

Nonetheless we were hungry so finished the appetizers and when done, discussed how odd it was that no one had taken our entree orders yet. It seemed kids were running the place. We sat there listening to the teenagers in charge of the oven bantering with each other, seemingly unrelated to their work. I expect that in a fast food place. In a restaurant that charges $22 for a 10" personal size pizza, I expect a more professional chef to be in charge of my food prep.

Our decision to leave was finalized when yet another server came by to quickly sweep our menus away, muttering "I'll just take these", without so much as even a glance in our direction, much less a check in to see if we needed anything. He was busy trying to seat the next table.

Overall a real shame because I've never been to the original Joia on Yonge, always wanted to try it and now knowing they are run by the same company I would be hesitant to go.

Not sure we would risk returning to Joia on Main. At these prices, service needs to really tighten up. Possibly food too but hard to say since we didn't get to sample much of it.

Edited to add: it's been 5 months since this review was posted and no restaurant representative has addressed this comment.

Edited to add: its now been a year and still no restaurant representative or manager has either replied to this comment or contacted us to make this right. It's obvious that good customer service isn't a priority.

Suffice to say we have not been back and still have not taken our business to the original Joia either, as result. Really disappointed. Cool patio vibe in nice weather (when no lockdown) but I can't give this place thumbs...