Crickets Grill and Draft House

August 25, 2008
Positives: HUGE selection, great atmosphere (daytime), easily best place in town for a beer. Negatives: Service is awful (expected in Lubbock), too crowded atmosphere (nighttime when college is in), sadly the ONLY decent place in town for a beer!

May 4, 2008
Went on a busy Friday night at about 1am. Large college crowd, and about 95% of them were indulging on BMC’s. Some of the stuff is rather pricey, but about what I expected. Decent service and very good selection for the area. The Real Ale Brown Ale I had was fresh and delicious. For Lubbock, this place is great... and easily #1 in my humble opinion.

June 21, 2007
Enjoyable Atmosphere, very good pool tables, shuffleboard, and darts. Good Selection of beers on tap, but, as others have sated, too many macro brews. The mug club is a nice little touch, as is NTN trivial. Overall, the best place in Lubbock to have a beer.

January 24, 2006
Well, what can you really expect in Lubbock? I agree that the lights were too far up. Selection not as bad as suggested- this is West Texas after all. There is now way the can match Gman in Austin- unfair comparison. Service was okey-dokey with cute co-eds.

December 9, 2005
Cricket’s has about 75-80 beers on tap, similar to the Ginger Man in Austin that I frequent. However, the difference in selection is absolutely night and day. Whereas the Ginger Man has a carefully hand picked tap roster devoid of macro swill (except for one token exception), Cricket’s is almost the opposite: it appears that they’ve had to fill their tap handles with every variety of every common macro out there. Also, they still had Anchor Old Foghorn on tap in the middle of the summer! The Foghorn, being a barleywine, fared well, but with this little attention paid to rotation I can see why others have noted freshness issues. It was mid-day when we went, so not much of a crowd, but it did strike me that the place was too brightly lit. This became apparent as we were drinking mostly stronger beers which my friend couldn’t get back home in Amarillo, so the buzz kicked in pretty quickly for the both of us. The light may not be too distracting on that first beer or two, but once the pupils get to dilating it’s definitely a buzzkill. Overall though, a nice little bar in a nice little neighborhood, definitely a beer oasis in an area of the country where you wouldn’t expect to find anything half as good.