DENVER • What made the Cherry Cricket so great? 

This is a question Lee Driscoll has often considered throughout his two decades of ownership. “Fairy dust” was the answer he came up with upon stepping into the Cherry Creek institution in 2001. 

“I did really believe it was fairy dust,” he says now. “And I still believe there’s a bit of fairy dust involved.” 

How else to explain 80 years of this burger haven? 

How else to explain the Cherry Cricket standing the test of time and change that overcame the surrounding neighborhood?

Yes, Cherry Creek is now Denver’s posh epicenter, a glassy and glossy hub of designer shopping, fine dining and high-rise living. But the neighborhood used to be the low-slung, working-class home of the city dump. That’s a time and place the brick-walled, wood-paneled Cricket better matches, a last vestige tucked here between an oyster bar, cocktail bar and Goldman Sachs offices. 

The neighborhood transformation was well underway when Driscoll and Breckenridge-Wynkoop, LLC, took ownership. But all along the Cricket stood strong and strange, what Driscoll saw as “smoky, stinky but special.”

Special for the burgers, yes. For the service demanded by the previous proprietor, the late Eli McGuire, seen smooching a bartender in a picture Samantha Taxin keeps. 

“She was the life of the party,” says today’s general manager, who started as a host 20 years ago. “But yet she was strict as far as level of service went. … She really embodied what hospitality is today.” 

Indeed, Driscoll saw that hospitality. But indeed, along with that and the burger, there was much more to the Cricket. 

“I just couldn’t put my finger on it,” he says. “And so that’s why I said fairy dust. … Which made me deathly afraid of changing it.” 

The continued resistance, the reputation as Cherry Creek’s proud black sheep ー this remains the aim through 80 years of business now.

But of course the business has changed in some ways, starting right around the beginning.

The Cherry Cricket traces its beginnings somewhere across its spots here on 2nd Avenue, past the hotels and condos, back where the mall rises in the place of the former dump. Here in 1945, the daughter of a German immigrant, Mary Zimmerman, was running a bar and perhaps serving the likes of people described in a Denver Public Library account: “servants to those at the nearby country club (often segregated minorities), junk men, and construction workers who lived in simple cinder block and frame hovels.”

In 1946, according to that account, Chicago-born Temple Buell announced his plan to build Denver’s second major shopping center. Ground broke in 1950, around the time Zimmerman’s Bar changed hands.

The name changed to the Cherry Cricket under the next owner, who erected the neon marquee still glowing above the restaurant today ー “Duffy’s Cherry Cricket,” it reads. That’s for Bernard Duffy, who became owner in 1963, historian Thomas Noel writes in another account: “Duffy expanded and modernized, making the Cricket chirp with good inexpensive food, libations and lively pool tables.” 

According to the restaurant’s own telling, Duffy retired in 1972 and from there “ownership details get a little sketchy. So does The Cricket’s reputation.”

Now overseeing the brand today, Alex Bunn became aware of that reputation while growing up in Denver. 

“I have a lot of friends who, as soon as they came of age, this was the go-to place,” she says. “It was not mine. I did not want those kinds of skeletons in my closet.” 

The Cherry Cricket was rowdy, and it seems it was worse than that. Noel notes health inspectors closed the place at one point ー “not only crickets but roaches were thriving here.” Then, in 1990, “to the rescue came Elizabeth ‘Eli’ Peck McGuire, who grew up a few blocks north on 7th Avenue Parkway.” 

John Hickenlooper spoke of honoring McGuire’s vision following her death in 2001. That’s when the Wynkoop Brewing Co. co-founder announced buying the Cherry Cricket, ahead of his career that took him to today’s U.S. Senate seat and ahead of his company merging into today’s Breckenridge-Wynkoop, LLC. 

McGuire had created “an institution,” Hickenlooper told The Denver Post at the time of the acquisition. “One of my visions for the restaurant business is to have a place where all walks of life freely mix. That’s the Cherry Cricket.” 

That’s what Hickenlooper’s partner, Driscoll, saw back then ー a place for the wealthy who had moved into the neighborhood and also for the people who had been there all along. Look across the green tabletops and booths today, and you’ll see men in suits beside men in orange vests, taking a break from construction that has never stopped all around the Cricket. 

Smoking, however, did stop with the statewide ban in 2006. Would the smoking crowds disappear? “I thought we were done for,” Driscoll recalls. 

Instead business boomed more than ever, inspiring expansions into the barbershop and frame shop next door. The restaurant filled with families, a clientele that had apparently avoided the smoke over the years. Families like Taxin’s, among regulars back then. 

“It felt like we were at home,” the multi-unit manager says. “It was kind of like ‘Cheers.’ Everybody knew our name.” 

Taxin would be the one getting to know names later as a host. She’d be working one fateful night in 2016, the busy night before Thanksgiving. 

Flames rose from the kitchen. They kept rising. 

Outside with the rest of the staff and evacuated customers, Taxin watched the fire consume the place. 

“We were devastated. How could this have happened?” she remembers thinking. “But more importantly, how are we gonna get it back?”

The Cricket would return to its same old appearance ー green tabletops and booths, wood paneling, wall-length fish tank, miniature hockey rink overhead and all. This was in ownership keeping a promise from the beginning: “We made it crystal clear we weren’t gonna change anything,” Driscoll says.

The fire threatened, but that fairy dust remained. And as ever, Driscoll feared messing with it. He has always described that fear, all while listening to requests of customers from far beyond Cherry Creek.

“I can’t tell you how many people told me over the years, ‘I wish we had a Cricket, I wish we had a Cricket,'” Driscoll says. “You could see the demand was there. But there was also that fear.” 

That fear, he says, of losing something unique. “The last thing we want is to be labeled a chain,” he says. 

And so it’s been a careful expansion, starting with the downtown location in 2018 and, most recently, the Broomfield location that opened earlier this year. The growth has been overseen by Bunn, whose marketing career took her to major brands such as Taco Bell and Starbucks before this odd, quaint one she knew back in her hometown. 

While moving into former restaurant spaces, “we’ve talked a lot about not being a cookie cutter,” Bunn says. “So we’ve wanted to retain the character of the restaurants that preceded us and what the community loves about those restaurants, but then also infusing the Cricket experience, look and feel.” 

As they aimed to do most recently in Broomfield, moving into a former Old Chicago. And as they aimed to do previously in Littleton, moving into a much older, quirky space formerly home to the Crestwood Inn. 

“Quirky” might be one word to describe the space, anyway. “Like a Hobbit house,” says Bunn, who recalls Driscoll describing it another way: “‘It’s just ugly enough to be a Cricket.'” 

With just the right amount of fairy dust. 

On the menu 

Cherry Cricket’s regulars commonly build their own burger, starting first with a quarter-pound or half-pound patty. At last check, the menu listed 40 toppings between different cheeses, proteins, spreads, “crunches” and “other goodies.” Owner Lee Driscoll is known to just add smoked cheddar. “The burger by itself is that good,” he says. 

Award-winning combinations are listed on the side. The Cricket Royale might be most popular ー swiss, caramelized onions, crispy onion strings, roasted garlic and onion jam and garlic aioli on a pretzel bun. The Cry Baby is another favorite that piles swiss, caramelized onions, crispy onions, a house-made cheese blend and French onion spread on a crostini. Also recommended is the 303 Green Chile Relleno, with white cheddar and pork green chili. 

Driscoll calls the green chili “the unsung hero” of the restaurant. The Cricket offers other soups, salads, sandwiches and wraps, including a Reuben and chicken specialties. Appetizers include crispy mac and cheese bites, wings, nachos and Cherry Bombs ー three-pepper Colby Jack cheese sticks fried and dipped in a raspberry pepper jam. 

If you go 

The Cherry Cricket’s original location is in Denver’s Cherry Creek neighborhood, 2641 E. 2nd Ave. Other locations downtown, Littleton and Broomfield. cherrycricket.com 

About the series 

Craving Colorado is a regular dive into the culinary character of the Centennial State. Send your recommendations to [email protected]