Harry’s Cafe & Place

The wait is crazy long for food. An hour ticket time for breakfast! Unless you have all day to wait for a just okay breakfast.

Nice enough lunch. Pleasant outside seating. Not a great deal of variety on the lunch menus though …

Food was fantastic. Some of the best hash browns I ever had! Food was really tasty and loved that they cared enough to put fresh cut flowers on each of the tables. Décor was a bit dark, but very very clean.

Got seated right away on a Sunday morning was great however then we waited quite awhile for our food. Food was just ok. Daughters French toast tasted like funnel cake. Eggs florentine was decent. Husband and sons omelets were small. Won’t be returning.

So the place we got brunch at doesn’t serve alcohol so we were on a quest for bloody Mary’s after our food. A local recommended Harry’s to us saying that it was more of a townie bar but good Bloody Mary’s.
Not a whole lot going on in the bar at 11am on Sunday so I started to ask the man working in the bar area if we could push two tables together for our group of 7. He cut me off saying, «I know where I am, what do you want». I was definitely taken aback and a bit confused but I told him we wanted to sit on the bar for some drinks. He did push the two tables together but the whole thing was just bizarre. The Bloody Marys were subpar. They were actually pretty thick, almost like a salsa. Two redeeming factors, the chasers were Point’s Amber beer which was great and our server was nice. We decided not to stick around for another round. Would I go back? Sure, for a beer but not much else.

They are so understaffed. Took at least 15 minutes till a servers came to take our order. The breakfast menu is overpriced. Took another 15 mins to get our order. Omlettes come with toast if you want hash browns or pancakes extra charge. The omlette was greasy, could only eat half. The food was hot and freshly cooked The sever was warm and friendly! Reason for the two stars
Very small restraunt and outdated as well as the menu.

You would think that with being located in a tourist town in their downtown center their service would be good. It’s not.
Come here if you’d like to wait 30 minutes for water. Come here if you don’t want to be served unless you grab someone’s attention and place an order while they roll their eyes at you.
It’s not worth your time… And I still haven’t gotten my pancakes yet 45 minutes in.

We stopped here on a whim on a saturday afternoon before attending a wedding. Their menu has limited options, I ordered their patty melt served with chips and my wife ordered their basic cheeseburger with fries (for an extra charge). The patty melt was small and the serving of chips was near non-​existent. My wife’s burger was thin and a bit greasy but otherwise ok. The main issue we had was that we felt it was very over priced for the quality and serving size of what we received. We understand that we were in Lake Geneva (tourist central) but feel we could have found a better establishment.

The egg florentine is delicious! My hubby enjoyed the corn beef hash– food was a little slow

Good breakfast special. Have always had good service and nice people run the place as a resident I recommend. We love the Hash brown’s.

For breakfast or brunch, one cannot go wrong with Harry’s! Yes, its a bit divey, but so are most diners. Within the diner context, Harry’s is 5-​stars!
For brunch I usually end up getting the same thing every time we go – Eggs Benedict with the famous hash browns. The hash browns are the best because they’re golden brown and not brunt, but actually fully cooked… DELICIOUS — no need for ketchup or hot sauce!
The coffee is superb and the mimosas are great too. My husband LOVES the Bloody Mary!

I’m starting to think this place is some kind of front. I have no idea how they are still in business, even in a touristy place like Lake Geneva. The place has a rather unpleasant odor, they must not get the nooks and crannies. The service is horrible even when there is like 2 to 3 families in there. Be prepared to wait 10+ minutes for anything, even water or extra napkins.
The food… all I can say is LOL. My mom ordered a grilled cheese, the cheese was not melted all the way and the bread was half done and tasted like old oil. I ordered a burger, and it tasted like something I ate in middle school. That is just two examples. Seriously, the simplest, fool-​proof food is always somehow messed up. The poor, innocent food is being tortured! I’m surprised we never got ill from eating there. It is tradition for my mom and I to come here during our annual visit to the town JUST so we can make fun of the food and service. However, the last time we were there, we decided enough was enough and won’t be back, even for the laughs.

We didn’t eat here. In fact, I didn’t know this place served food until I bookmarked it to review. We thought it was just a bar.
We came by here one night as we heard live music pouring out onto the sidewalk, and in an effort to change up our nightly adventures, we wandered in.
Interesting place, not super huge, slightly divey, Wisconsin divey not Chicago divey, and they had an open mic type of band night thing going on.
After spending so much time around teenagers everywhere else in town (seriously, they run Lake Geneva, don’t they?), we encountered the opposite crowd. We’re not spring chickens but other than one of the bartenders and a few high school band kids, we were the youngest there. Not that it was a bad thing, it just struck us as mucho noticeable.
And after training the young bartender a bit, things were fine. The music was entertaining enough. Lots of different musicians trading in and out. But then the band ring leader guy was pushing folks and pushing and pushing and pushing folks to dance, dance, dance, clap, dance, participate participate participate. Dance! Participate! C’mon!!! All good and fine for some folks, but it wore our nerves so we took off.
Not a super huge place to listen to live music and once it fills up, it’s tough to sit or move about comfortably. We’d probably give the place another shot but may not rush right back.

Don’t even think about complaining about the bad service!
This place had the worst service/​customer service I’d ever experienced. When the four of us sat down, there was only four other tables of customers and two waitresses there. After we ordered, we waited 35 minutes for our appetizer (which was cold), 45+ minutes for our food (part of the order was wrong), never got our bbq sauce we asked for (twice) and never once, in all that time, did we get our drinks refilled. The table next to us called the manager over and calmly started complaining about the same horrible service, especially how their son didn’t get his food until they were done eating and the fact that the waitress added 18% tip to their bill. The manager just started yelling at them, saying they were trying to steal and called the police on them. Seriously just called the police on them. We didn’t even complain about the 18% added onto our check. We just paid it and got the hell out of there!

Surprisingly good for breakfast. Went up for Mother’s Day and it was the only place without a wait. The pancakes were light and very crêpe like. The French toast was excellent! Omelet was also VERY good! Additionally, I had a couple Bloody Mary’s, and they were great. We are outside on the sidewalk, inside did not look like much but the food was outstanding and as I said surprisingly good!

Decent food in an uninspiring atmosphere. The perch dinner was good, not great. The gyros dinner was very good. The place could use an update.

Not a bad place — we were there for lunch and we were the only ones in there. We had sandwhiches and split a fernch onion soup. I loved the soup but my sandwhich description was a turkey bacon BLT and it was really a turkey sandwhich with bacon– uh I don’t do pork— I picked it off but didn’t like the smell at all! Overall it was OK– it was a small bar set up. I don’t know if I would go back but it wasn’t bad!

The waitress didn’t have a clue what she was doing and looked really bored. I made the mistake of getting the Gyro plate and it seemed to be pieces of formed gyro that came out of a frozen package. It has the feel of a Greek-​owned place so I thought ordering Greek food would be safe. NO reason to go back.

A diner that’s located smack-​dab in an area that attracts a lot of tourists faces a dilemma. It can can either go the extra mile and try to be a truly stellar place, or it can just coast by, knowing that there will always be a steady stream of people coming through that they don’t really have to try and impress since most of them won’t be coming back anyway. Harry’s falls into the latter category.
I think the starting point for a diner whose breakfast is by and large nothing special and identical to what most people could attempt at home should be 3 stars. Things like bacon, eggs, and toast, etc. are simple enough, so as long as they don’t screw it up, things like service and atmosphere is what will tip the scale one way or the other.
At Harry’s, the service gets them a two in my book. Our server forgot part of my wife’s order, even though the place wasn’t very busy. That in and of itself isn’t horrible, but the real kicker for me was when I asked to have a refill of my water in the same size glass that the sodas came in (the water is brought out to you in a small glass that for me, isn’t nearly enough for even half the meal). The waitress told me that they’re not allowed to give customers water in the larger glasses that the soda comes in, and gave no explanation as to why. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!? I tend to go through several normal sized glasses of water during a meal, and these glasses are less than half that size. Given the absurdity of the rule, the servers should have been hovering to give refills, but that was not the case. It’s funny how a seemingly little detail like this can ruin a place for someone, but there it is. I’m not going back to place where waitresses aren’t ‘allowed’ to give me an adult sized water.

A little overpriced, in my opinion, considering the fare and the facilities, but that seems to characterize many (if not most) of the establishments of Lake Geneva, beholden as they are to transient tourist traffic.
I ordered and received an entirely competent BLT; the fairly inexpensive and fairly eye-​opening Bloody-​Mary I requested alongside the sandwich likewise shared in this competence, and was putatively on the strong/​high-​vodka side of the spectrum (or so my companions reported: the proportions tasted appropriate to me). The pulchritudinous highlight, however, were the extraordinarily *awesome* thickly house-​cut, house-​fried potato chips, speckled ever-​so-​lightly with thick, rough-​flaked rock-​salt — chips so good, in fact, that I was tempted to award an additional star, and certainly an item that separates Harry’s from the continuum of pretty banal tourist diners lining Lake Geneva’s Main Street.
I also sampled one of the chicken-​strips from a companion’s plate, and found them (and their attendant cup of barbecue sauce) utterly standard, but satisfactory nonetheless. The service too was fair, and fairly fast, though otherwise not especially noteworthy — not unlike the establishment as a whole, really.
So, to sum: Harry’s «Café & Place» is probably not the absolute best option for lunch in Lake Geneva, but one could stray *much* worse, and Harry’s at least has a little more local inflection and lower-​than-​average prices, compared to its Main Street compatriots. Plus: they’ve got these fucking delicious-​ass house-​made chips, and beer and spirits to boot.