Mercer Kitchen & Beer Hall

Order the karaage at Mercer Kitchen & Beer Hall and it arrives crisp and hot, brightened with lemon and togarashi aioli — the kind of plate you would expect from an izakaya, not a hotel beer hall. Mercer is both at once. The kitchen cooks an izakaya-inspired, locally sourced menu from a heritage hotel on Ontario Street in downtown Stratford, and pours a rotating Ontario craft beer list a few steps from the table.

The menu borrows freely and cooks with intent. Slow-roasted Perth pork belly turns up in bao with peanut powder and fermented mustard greens, and again in a banh mi over chicken liver pâté. Steam-bun pierogies get wok-fried and stuffed with old cheddar and potato, then plated with kimchi and sour cream. A coconut curry soup of roasted chicken and vegetables sets up the larger seafood khao soi — cod, mussels, shrimp and bay scallops in a mild coconut-curry broth with thin wheat noodles. Heavier plates hold the same line: a butter chicken built on gochujang-marinated breast and thigh poached in butter, finished with nori and lime pickle; surf-and-turf sushi hand rolls of seared Wagyu bavette, shoestring potato and sturgeon caviar; a foie gras wonton soup in broth drawn from Perth pork. Local sourcing runs underneath all of it — Perth pork, Mountainoak gouda, trout from nearby water — pulled through Japanese, Korean and Thai technique.

What reads at first like a scramble of cuisines is one idea applied with discipline: take pub and beer-hall formats and rebuild them through an izakaya lens without losing the local larder underneath. The fish and chips make the case — panko-tempura local trout under katsu curry, with yuzu tartar and crushed wasabi peas on triple-cooked fries. The Ontario craft beer program runs on the same logic. The list rotates, and the food is built to keep pace with it: bao and steam-bun pierogies are made to be passed around and to stand up to a few different pours, so a drinks stop turns into a full meal without anyone deciding it should.

The reach pays off when a table cannot agree: a classic burger with Perth pork bacon and smoked Mountainoak gouda for the traditionalist, a Bangkok Caesar with lemongrass-roasted pork belly and crispy rice noodles for the salad-minded, a Korean barbecue chicken rice bowl with a sesame omelette for whoever wants the sharper end. Tables splitting the difference land on the Fun in the Bun Platter — one each of the pork, shrimp and tofu bao, no substitutions.

Mercer stretches across the day, too. Breakfast and a Sunday brunch put the Benedicts front and centre — the Mercer Eggs Benedict keeps the local-pork thread going under curried hollandaise, while the Korean kimchi Benedict pushes back toward the sharper side of the kitchen. Huevos Rancheros covers anyone who wants something more familiar. Afternoons bring a daily happy-hour drinks window, with pours like a lychee sangria, a green-tea highball and a limoncello spritz. Thursday into the weekend, the doors stay open to midnight, with a late-night menu for the crowd coming out of Stratford's theatres.

Mercer Kitchen & Beer Hall has worked this corner of Ontario Street since 2013, in a town that fills its dining rooms around a theatre season and quiets when the curtains go dark. A beer hall that also serves brunch, runs a pan-Asian kitchen and stays open late is built for exactly that rhythm — broad enough to catch a pre-show dinner, a Sunday Benedict, an afternoon pour or a midnight plate, and specific enough that none of it reads as compromise. The local pork and the Ontario taps stay constant; the rest is the kitchen deciding, night after night, what a Stratford beer hall is allowed to cook.