Rick's Tavern Inc

Rick's is the kind of place visited by people who have never heard of Yelp. Nobody decides to go to Rick's based on a Google search about 'nightlife' in the area. Reasons to go to Rick's include: 1) it's a bar; and, 2) it's there.

Rick's works like any other bar. If you want to get a little buzzed, drink a few beers. If you want to get drunk, then simply increase the speed at which you drink each beer so you have time to drink more of them. If you want get sick and throw up in the parking lot, consider doing shots in between each beer.

If you want to be social, hang out in the back room by the bar. If you want to avoid making eye contact with strangers, you can shoot pool or darts in the front room. Everything else is pretty straightforward here... The women's room is even subtitled "no men allowed," for the benefit of the hard-of-thinking.

And yet, if you're an out-of-towner looking for a colorful slice of life in a sleepy town on the bay, you'll find it here. Mattapoisett is a fairly affluent town, but it's not at all a pretentious one. The drinkers here are neither white collar nor blue collar; maybe you'd call them salty collar. Some of them even read books in between drinking sessions. And most people here can hold a conversation about the Sea. Surprisingly for a town so small, no one looks you over and it's even possible for a stranger to find some anonymity here. Unless you live in town and you're the guy who did shots between each beer and threw up in the parking lot, in which case the pastors at both churches down the street will mention you by name in their evening prayers.

If you really want to get local, you should order a quahog. Rick's quahog is something of an abstract expressionist dish, a microcosm of quahog digging itself- eating through the breading and sand is tedious no matter how much lemon and butter you put on it, but if you're persistent you'll eventually find a few bits of quahog. In much the same way, in a sparsely salooned town like Mattapoisett, you walk down enough streets and you'll eventually find Rick's.

Saw this place the moment I moved to town and was reminded of the dive in my small hometown. It's narrow and has pool, Elvis pinball, jukebox, some tvs, and an arcade game.

If you like paying $3 for a bottle of Bud and $1 for pool, by all means, visit. It's the type of bar you could see being rough-and-tumble in a factory town.

They do have free pool on Tuesdays. Haven't gone for that yet.