Brown Jug

Every time I eat there I try something new.  They have such a fun menu that it just makes you want to try new things.  It isn't meant to be a culinary explosion in your mouth it is meant to be yum and hit the spot.  I would say it does just that with a nice tall glass of beer or one of their fun shots!

Food's decent, prices are decent, and the drink specials are pretty good.  I mean, by no means is it the best food I've ever had, but it's about what you'd expect at a bar like this.  That right there would be a four star review, but I'm going with a solid three based on the less than stellar service here.

I've been here twice, both times with very few other people in the bar.  So you'd expect service to be pretty good, right?  The first time, it wasn't too bad; maybe a little slow, but nothing to write home about.  The second time, our waitress just could not get our bills right.  Somebody else had taken our food orders, so that could understandably lead to some confusion.  But she came over to us afterwards to match up our food orders with our drinks.  That looked pretty promising.  It wasn't.

Our drinks were spread out randomly across the bills.  Only one of the six of us had their bill right.  When she came back, we explained where everything should be, even wrote it on the receipts, but when she came back with our cards, there were still plenty of mistakes.  We tried once more to correct it, and things looked right.  But when the charge hit my bank account, it was $2 higher than it should have been.  I'm not gonna make a scene over $2, but that definitely hurt my chances of ever going back.

Also, I don't care for the fact that they put your entire credit card number on the bill...

Let me start by mentioning that I worked here for a couple years during my days as a UM student ...back in the early 1980's.  I hadn't been back to Ann Arbor in over 20 years so I had no idea if this place even existed.  My brother, whom I brought along on my trip, and I were thrilled to find it was still i business.  The place looks about the same and we settled in at just past the opening time of 11 AM on a Wednesday morning (during UM spring break).

My brother ordered coffee and we got the menus.  The breakfast selection was surprisingly thin - and breakfast is what we wanted.  I probably cooked 10,000 eggs of all varieties when I worked here back in the day and we made great breakfasts to order.  Well ... all this place offers is omelets and pancakes.  We asked the waitperson if we could get hash browns and eggs over easy.  He said they only made omelets.  What?!  I asked to go ask the fry cook if he'd make some simple eggs over easy.  After a short wait he returned to tell us that they'd do scrambled eggs but no other type of preparation.  Seriously?! We were the first, and only customers at that point, in the restaurant.

Finished our coffee, for which we were charged two bucks for a small cup, and left to find a place that wanted our service (ended up at The Broken Egg, for which I'll also write a review - a very positive one).

This was a just a terrible experience returning to one of my favorite haunts back in my student days.  I'm happy the place is still in business but it's just not the same place I loved.  Won't be back.