The Cricketts Inn
Burton Road, Acresford, Swadlincote DE12 8AP
From the outside this is a nice looking pub, clean, tidy, well kept and set in beautiful rural surroundings. Inside it is a fairly standard looking country pub, rustic and welcoming, if a little bit on the scruffy side.
I arrived early and sat at the bar to have a couple of drinks, despite the pub not being particularly busy, the bar clearly hadn’t been cleaned properly in some time and had become very sticky and was giving off a smell of stale beer. Being a Marston’s affiliated country pub I was expecting a reasonable selection of ales, disappointingly they only had two ales on tap, one of which was Pedigree and the other was Lancaster Bomber. I ordered myself a pint of Pedigree and took a long swig the beer was definitely off, it tasted of nothing but sulphur, I didn’t drink the rest. I mentioned it to one the girls serving, she seemed not to care at all and didn’t do anything to rectify the situation, again this was somewhat disappointing.
After about ten minutes they called us through and we were seated, I ordered a starter of black pudding bhajis. When they were brought out they were nicely presented and looked freshly cooked, I cut into them they were still hot and nicely crisp. They had a very pleasant texture and taste though they didn’t seem to contain an awful lot of black pubbing, which being black pudding bhajis, was a bit of a let down.
Shortly after the starters had been cleared away they started bringing out the mains, I had ordered a 16oz ribeye steak, chips and grilled mushrooms, I asked for the steak to be cooked rare. I was glad to see the chips were not frozen chips and had definitely been hand cut, they were nice but nothing spectacular and the portion size left a lot to be desired. The steak was what really let them down in my eyes, it was nowhere the size or thickness that a 16oz should be, I would put the size somewhere between the 10 and 12oz mark. When I cut into it, it was definitely not rare, it was quite dry and after the first bite I could tell it had not been seasoned at all. Because of how my earlier issue had been dealt with by the staff, I chose not to raise it and continued to eat. Fortunately one of the group I was with had a pot of black peppercorn sauce and was willing to share, this actually improved the meal enough for me to finish the plate.
Some of the group chose to have deserts, I decided not to as nothing on the menu really appealed to me and I had been a little bit put off by how disappointed I was by the rest of the meal.
Unfortunately I had heard good things prior to eating at The Cricketts Inn, coupled with the fact that menu read very well and the prices weren’t particularly cheap, I went in with high hopes and I think this is partially why I was so disappointed with my experience. The food itself wasn’t actually that bad but it also wasn’t particularly good, it was disappointingly average.
