Carolina Ale House - Jacksonville — Restaurant in Jacksonville

We always eat here when we have to stay in in Jacksonville overnight for my medical treatments and surgeries. We stay at the Hampton and Carolina Ale House & Panera Bread are basically in the parking lot. Carolina Ale House usually wins out over the other. We've eaten here several times. Things are a little different now with everything going on, we get that. We had a late night dinner for 2. There were not very many people in there at 9-9:30 pm. Our waitress was really great. Very attentive. We ordered their Five Cheese Spinach Dip with pita bread and tortilla chips as an appetizer. It was AMAZING! Just the right temp and one of the best spinach dips I've ordered in a restaurant. You really must try it!!Unfortunately, we barely started on our appetizer and our meals were delivered. Seriously, one bite of our appetizer. I ordered the 3 Fish Tacos with Tortilla Chips and my husband ordered the Chicken Avocado Sandwich with Sweet Potato Tots as his side. My plate looked wonderful and the tacos were good, but I had problems eating more than one. The one little fish strip in the bottom is fried, which is perfectly fine, but this was a little dry that night even with the crema and pico. I don't know if it was over fried or what caused it to be dry with all the sauce on the taco. The taco was definitely 90% pico, avocado, crema, etc and 10% one little, poor, fried, dried out fish piece at the bottom. I was looking forward to those tacos because I knew how good they were in the past. The Chicken Avocado Sandwich my husband ordered was the same way. The sandwich was good, but the chicken dry. His requested side was sweet potato tots. He loved those. His only complaint was that if he'd ordered fries, half his plate would be covered with fries, but he just got that tiny, little bowl of tots that he loved so much. We aren't the type to complain, especially at a restaurant where we normally get absolutely wonderful food, plus we were extremely tired, I was in a lot of pain from traveling, and we were just ready to get to our hotel so we didn't say anything. If I didn't know that they served better food than this from previous visits I wouldn't have given 4 stars, but they're usually great AND that spinach dip saved that rating too. We should've stuck with the spinach dip that night then gone straight...

While we typically have great food and service at this Carolina Ale House. Our visit last night will keep us from going back for sometime. I couldn't tell you if the food was good because they messed up my order the same way TWICE.. They also delivered my soup that was an App with our dinners... After the second time my meal came out wrong, I told them to keep it. My wife was already done. This is after we had to correct our order that Sam, our waitress, was taking twice. She was not listening. The only thing that came out correct or when it was suppose to, was the water we were drinking. Is it really that hard to put Jalapenos on the side of Nachos... Then to have the Waitress tell me "those are not Jalapenos, they are scallions" when the order came out the second time incorrect too? Seriously if you don't know the difference between cut scallions and Jalapenos you should probably not be working in a restaurant!... The manager came by and said he was sorry, and kept trying to get me to let them make it a third time.. I said NO just remove it from our order..My wife had BEEN done with her meal at this point and we just wanted to leave. We finally got the bill, paid and left. They did give us a free app card to get us to come back... Really how bout fixing the meal that was just a disaster!! I don't expect free food when an order is messed up, it happens, fix it and I'm good.. But when you are messing up the entire meal, more than once and the order was not correct to begin with, its worth the $16 tab to make it right. I have worked in restaurants for more than 20 yrs.. Everything about our service from waitress to the manager was a disappointment last night. Please if you go to this restaurant in Jacksonville NC..Make sure you do not have SAM as your server. We use to go to Carolina Ale House regularly it has always been...

I really try to refrain from leaving negative reviews. It’s very easy to complain so, I normally only go out of my way to leave reviews when I have a good experience. However, I used to really enjoy going to the Ale House. The food was really good and the service was great. Over the past year though the service and food has taken a nose dive. My wife and I used to frequent the Ale every other weekend. We started to get the same waitress every time and she was not attentive and would constantly mess up our order. I try to be understanding because I used to work in a restaurant. The issue was I could watch her not doing here job and every order we placed was botched. We did not go there for sometime and we tried again a few months later. The Coronavirus Pandemic just set in so all our food was take out. It wasn’t on par with what we used to get there at all. In their defense most of the take we were getting wasn’t as good as normal so we chocked it up as a loss. We went to eat there tonight, trying to give it another chance. This time we brought our three sons. The service was tolerable but the food was overpriced and not very good. I was charged 18 dollars for a sliver of grilled salmon. I was told it 6 oz portion. I have no issue with a 6 oz piece of fish but the menu didn’t specify. I don’t think most people would pay close to twenty bucks for 6 ounces of fish. I was told it was thicker but the ends were thin and crisp and there was no flavor to it. The grilled chicken in my wife’s salad was very chewy and my son’s hamburgers were very bland and dry. I have had good burgers there before and these were not anything close to what they used to serve. I will give a place a chance quite a few times but this was the last one. I should have just given them a hundred bucks and picked up Wendy’s on...