McMenamins Kennedy School

Cool place. Huge (an old elementary school). Found the restaurant area. Big, open. We sat outside. No food. Six beers. All good. Good thing since they've had 4 decades to figure things out. Server was nice and attentive. Parking tight. Nice place.

Visited July 2017. Came here with some friends after leaving the Alberta Great Notion location. This place is a massive old schoolhouse that's now a hotel with a bunch of different bars and some other stuff (movie theater, restaurants). The beer is just gonna be your typical McMenamins stuff, but they have cocktails and guest offerings. Definitely a cool place to stop, though not necessarily for the beer.

Neat old school converted into a hotel + bar + movie theatre, etc. with an Eclectic (with a capital "E") décor. The food was on point, and the two beers I had were pretty solid. Worth a visit, even if it’s just for a quick pint and a walk around the grounds.

Visited here on a rainy Saturday night in early October ’16. I literally got lost walking around and had to ask the clerk at the hotel desk how to find the restaurant! Once inside, the place is overflowing with character, tons of antiques and knick knacks all about. Service was pretty solid and knowledgeable about the place. Beer was decent (everyone seems to knock it), and the food was pretty solid with plenty to choose from. Late at night, the place is kind of creepy and fun to walk around. Not sure if all the old pictures hanging on the wall are real, but it creates a great effect. A cool place for tourists which I was.

Have been here a couple times, but never rated it. First, it’s a McMenamins - with all that entails - but it’s also one of the main McMenamins where one can wander among four bars, a hotel, and a movie theater. (My wife and I, on this particularly night, went to see a movie.) Service, as always is pretty good, the prices are excellent, and the beer is generally mediocre. But the food isn’t too bad, depending on what you get. Whatever the case, this is well worth visiting if only for the atmosphere.

A cool place, a big old school. Many themed bars throughout. They have a hotel in here too. This would be a cool place to stay. The food, service and beer was all good.

Cool place. Huge hotel. 5 or 6 bar spaces. Decent food, and decent prices. The interior is very artsy with real attention to detail in many places. Very odd, sort of big old drunken schoolhouse feel. The only negative was the lack of diversity in the beer. I’ve been to many smaller McMenamins that had much more beer on tap. Sort of a shame. Otherwise, quite cool.

Stopped in to have a beer with my homie Douglas. This place is huge and crazy cool. Lots of fun rooms and many bars. All sorts of crazy decorations. The beers was okay normal stuff.

The pros: Everything about the place. There’s a charming, large, and busy (those things don’t always go together) restaurant with a gorgeous and lush courtyard. Great when the weather’s nice, or not. The courtyard has a very distinctive (and very large) chimenea covered with cool mosaic work. There’s a movie theater. The movie theater has fresh popcorn, fresh beer, comfortable couches, first-run movies, and waiter service. What else do you need? You don’t need anything else. Shut up. There’s a bar with tons of whiskeys where you can relax and smoke cigars. It’s called "Detention." OK, you might also need this. There’s an old gym where they have live music all the time. There’s a soaking pool with more lush landscaping (seriously, it’s everywhere) and cool mosaic work on the bottom. In fact, even the skylights have cool mosaic work. There are cool historic tidbits about the old schoolhouse, the neighborhood, past shows, coming shows, and quite a bit of stuff about John Coltrane, who certainly couldn’t ever have played a show in the gym here...could he? Nah. This is a huge sprawling one-story hotel with cool rooms carved out of old classrooms (one classroom = two hotel rooms, each with their own bathroom). There are random original bathrooms here and there. Kind of kid-sized, and they even have showers...why elementary school bathrooms needed showers back then, I dunno. There are other bars I didn’t see and can’t describe, and probably other features too. This is a great place to come for a cigar, or a meal, or a beer, or a drink, or a movie. It would be a great date getaway for a night or two. We just came in as a family group for lunch and we walked around, and we still had so much fun it took us an hour to leave after we ate. Can’t wait to come back with a date and stay the night.

We stayed at the Kennedy School House for a few days and checked out the restaurant and Boiler Room bar while we were there. Not super impressed with the beer, but the ambiance was fun and worth checking out for sure.