Harper's Restaurant & Brew Pub

Harpers is a great place if you go on wednesdays. Wednesday at Harpers everything is half price. Go early to skip the cover charge. The food is okay, but not spectacular by any means. In particular don't order the new york stip on wednesdays. It really looks horrible and it doesn't seem like such a good deal when you see the steak. The burgers are okay, but always seem to come out really well done when I order it medium. Aside from that, the beer is excellent and priced great, I recommend raspberry wheat or spartan wheat. You can get beer to go in 64oz jugs. The other downside is the service, It's almost always slow, you're better off going up to the bar to get your drinks than waiting for your server to come around. more

Let me begin this review by saying I really want to like Harper’s. I’m a big fan of micro-brewed beers and this place brews some great tasting beers. Forget about getting a Bud or Miller here; you’re only going to get a frosty pint of their beer. Now that’s the kind of confidence and arrogance that I can really get behind. The cuisine is excellent and I don’t recall ever eating a meal at Harper’s that I found to offend my fickle tastes. The décor is tasteful and classy. The place is a bit on the expensive side for a college town, however they do offer Half Off Wednesdays, where all food and drinks are, predictably, half-off. The place even has one of those cool TV walls; one could imagine with the proper contacts, you could plug in an NES and Super Mario Brother’s 3 and reenact the climatic scene from The Wizard. Unfortunately, this place suffers from a single, fatal flaw that makes dining or drinking here a rather unpleasant experience. In my estimation, this place has probably the single worst wait-staff of any establishment in the Greater Lansing area. Even when the place is at half capacity, the wait and bar staff are exceptionally slow. On a Wednesday, Friday or Saturday, you will be quite lucky to get any service at all. I cannot even begin to comprehend how this can be universally true for every single staff member since the place opened around 1998, but it is. I don’t know if management needs to implement a paradigm shift or a mission statement or any of that other goofy stuff that management does when their company has a serious employee problem, but I certainly wish they’d address this shortfall. more