Latest Reviews
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Food is good...service is good....but:Beware the Traverse City Parking Nazis. The street in front of Rare Bird has an unusual, poorly marked, and as i…
Antenna Man
Rare Bird Brewpub
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Best bar in TC, homemade beers that change and are great, nice revolving tap list. Food is really good, better than other bars in town. Service is the…
Zenn2000
Rare Bird Brewpub
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It took a long time to get acknowledged. The bartender service was terrible. A bunch of robots behind the bar who don't know how to be friendly or smi…
James Radley
Rare Bird Brewpub
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Rare Bird Brewpub is open for Microbrewery. Incorrect or missing information? Make a report, or claim the restaurant if you own it!Details
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8 Reviews on “Rare Bird Brewpub”
Best bar in TC, homemade beers that change and are great, nice revolving tap list. Food is really good, better than other bars in town. Service is the best. Off the main path in TC which is what you want.It’s like my living room. Love it
It took a long time to get acknowledged. The bartender service was terrible. A bunch of robots behind the bar who don’t know how to be friendly or smile. The worst service was from the bartender Brian, very rude. My friends and I will never return! I will pass this experience on to others!
Three of us started with three different beers: Hopricot, Founders Dirty Bastard Scotch Ale & Mystery IPA! They were excellent. We ordered Pork Belly Bahn Mi (excellent), Mac n’ Cheese (very spendy) and Shrimp Ceviche with plantain chips (tiny shrimp and stuck together plantain strips) an A, a B and a C. The bar staff did a great job. The building is wonderful. The clientele was composed of beautiful people. Next time I will have the Bahn Mi.
Beer was fabulous, loved the use of citrus. There were limited food options and they were sub-par. Will definitely go again for beer; not for dinner.
Everything wrong with the new TC in a single location.First off: the food and beer is decent. Not excellent, but adequate. If this were your city’s brewpub, it could do worse. The beer is your typical range of high-hop beers making good use of the local hop farms springing up to serve the haute farm-to-glass craze. If you like beer, you’ll like their beer fine. The food was VERY hit and miss. The vaunted fries were a mix of under- and over-cooked, dusted in pecorino and garlic and served with an extremely garlicky aioli that seemed to come with everything we ordered. Which turned out to be a common theme. The bbq sauce was used on the burger and the nachos. The cheese sauce was used on the nachos and man n cheese (which my wife disliked intensely, comparing it to a sad imitation of North Peak’s cheddar ale soup dumped over cavatappi). The calamari salad was overdressed and extremely overbreaded. Half the dressing and unbreaded squid and it’d probably be very tasty! My burger was VERY good, however. But for $14 with fries, definitely ambitiously priced. Which they certainly get away with. We went with my family and got there early. The place was packed but we lucked into a table within 10 minutes. The pub is impressively understaffed. 2 overworked waitresses did their best, but they each needed at least one clone to handle the workload. Same for the bartenders – with a mix of self-serve and sit down orders, they had about zero minutes off all night. This is terrible staffing, and the place suffers for it greatly.But my main gripe with the place is the atmosphere. It’s painfully hip, trying extremely hard to demonstrate its countercultual cache with a nonstop mix of tunes running the gamut from 1980s synthpop (Flock of Seagulls and Cure) all the way to 2010s synthpop (Matt & Kim and Passion Pit) – in a minimally but very intentionally decorated dining area. It was like dining in a cash-grab stereotype purgatory of everything that’s wonderful about alt-culture blown up into some terrible theme-park abomination.Add the busloads of pubcrawling out-of-towners and the Portlandia-inspired bird-name to this absurd money-grab and it adds up to one of the most overrated and underwhelming new spots in the new Traverse City among many lowlights.
Meh. The food was unique, well made, and very good, but don’t bother fighting the parking if you’re over 30, the hipster staff is just going to ignore you once you make it inside.
The atmosphere is interesting and comfortable. The home-brewed beers were very good and the selection of non-home beers great. Lettuce wraps and fish tacos very good. Katie did an exception job taking care of our large group.