Venue:- The Cricketers, Littlewick Green
Telephone:- 01628 822888
Unable to access website at time of writing.
As you travel west along the A4 from maidenhead you pass the Riders Hotel (formerly owned by Freddie Starr) then turn left into Coronation Road and you enter a different world. You are greeted with houses surrounding a cricket ground with the Cricketers pub nicely situated to be part of village life. You can imagine a warm balmy Saturday afternoon watching the thwack of willow against leather while sipping your Pimms – pint of real ale in my case! - while being interviewed gently by John Nettles as he tries to unravel yet another Midsummer Murder! To my knowledge at least three episodes were filmed on and around the village green.
But the pub – recently given a makeover by the new hosts – Jackie and Bob – is bright and airy and everything you would expect from a village pub. A warm welcome awaits all who enter, be they local villagers or passing travellers. The pub has the ideal summer setting and I imagine would be warm and cosy in the winter. There is a small car park but there is also plenty of roadside parking.
The food:-
Six of us blokes went to the pub for an evening of cards, to reminisce, and drink copious amounts of beer (Badgers – a good real ale, kept well), cider (somebody has to drink it!) and a few bottles of red wine (Nieto Malbec, an Argentinian wine which has won accolades in the past but I haven’t seen much of it around), Oh! And we thought we had better have some food to soak up the liquid. I thought the wine at £15.95 a bit pricey, but hey ho, we managed three bottles and you could have had cheaper wine – we wanted malbec, we got malbec so who is complaining.
The menu was what I call typical pub grub, steaks, gammon, steak and ale pie, a Thai curry and Barnsley chop plus other things I am unable to remember (damn that drink!).
Two had steaks, and both complemented that they were cooked as requested, one had the Barnsley Chop, very good – didn’t want the peas so they substituted other veggies – no problem. The rest of us had Gammon steak, beautifully cooked, not done to death as so often happens, a couple of eggs on top, grilled tomato, mushrooms, chips and a small side salad – delicious – it is what pub grub is all about. The plates were returned empty apart from the caveman brigade who didn’t eat the green stuff! Why ask for it if you are not going to eat it – what a waste.
This is a lovely pub in a lovely setting and I would recommend it to anybody just for a nice drink watching the cricket or sitting out during a hot summer and snacking on the lunchtime menu or having an evening meal with starters, mains and puds. It is called a ‘pub and restaurant’ but to me it is a pub that serves excellent pub food – a restaurant it ain’t. I wish Jackie and Bob well in their new venture and hope to sample more of the delicious ‘pub grub’ in the future.
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