Red Lobster RIP

This probably doesn’t merit a whole thread but this one is locked: Red Lobster: A Good Value or Ghetto?

Anyway: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/20/investing/red-lobster-restaurants-bankruptcy?cid=ios_app">Red Lobster files for bankruptcy

Sigh stupid thumbs

I went once in 1986.

Their cheddar biscuits are solid but my mom makes a passable bootleg version so I will survive this tragedy

First dined there in about 1972 (hush puppies a favorite). Last dined there in perhaps 1992.

Their all-you-can-eat 1 1/2 lb. Maine lobsters special was probably the cause of their downfall.

Josefa, yeah, crazy!

Last year, the chain stumbled on an all-you-can-eat shrimp deal that was so popular with diners, it helped push the company to an $11 million quarterly loss.

from the NYT story

reminds me of the scheme in The Producers.

That whole shrimp story just sounds so unlikely. How many shrimp can one person eat at once? Or maybe I don't want to know.

pimpc.jpg

You really don’t want to know (burp!)

How many shrimp can one person eat at once?

See recent discussion here:

Red Lobster - If You Must Bring It Up, Stick It Here

Yeah they were bought by a private equity firm who did the typical asset-stripping--selling the real estate to themselves and making the restaurants pay rent, etc.

Red Lobster one of those places like the Olive Garden, TGI Fridays or the Sharper Image I'm surprised hasn't reached the brink of bankruptcy yet.

― pplains, Tuesday, September 15, 2020 9:16 PM

https://i.imgur.com/hCihSUD.gif

This and Ponderosa steak house were basically my family's entire concept of eating out when we were growing up. They were eventually replaced by all-you-can-eat buffets so I can see why Red Lobster felt they had to do something similar. But it's not the kind of place I've returned to since leaving home and I hope this spurs their customer base to find better and/or more adventurous eating if it's available to them. (It was for us, which made the exclusionary choice of going there all the more frustrating.)

Yeah they were bought by a private equity firm who did the typical asset-stripping--selling the real estate to themselves and making the restaurants pay rent, etc.

― Are you addicted to struggling with your horse? (Boring, Maryland), Monday, May 20, 2024 12:34 PM (two days ago)

the way the private equity firm stripped the assets is really funny though. the firm was a thai seafood company (thai union) that farmed a lot of shrimp. they forced red lobster to do the endless shrimp promotion over the protests of the red lobster execs who were actually running the company as a way to force red lobster to buy a lot of shrimp from thai union - meaning that thai union made a ton of money from selling shrimp to red lobster.

The shrimp thing being a money loss is funnier when you realize the majority owner, Thai Union, is a seafood company and they had a huge shrimp surplus. Red Lobster buys their ridiculous surplus of shrimp, the parent company makes bank, and Red Lobster carries all the losses

damn it, I was beaten to the punch. thanks for stating it better, 龜

If the scope of the promotion forced Red Lobster into bankruptcy, then the Thai Union violated the first rule of parasites: weaken the host as far as you dare, but don't kill it.

weaken the host as far as you dare, but don't kill it.

i.e. how Red Lobster food functions

it was better for thai union to kill it because the equity they held in red lobster (i.e. the "equity" of "private equity") would have been worthless once red lobster entered bankruptcy. this was their way of extracting as much money as possible from red lobster before it went bankrupt xp

Just another big business scam, make a ton of money and let the burning wreck sail on into bankruptcy and insolvency.

Usually it is the real estate that is the good stuff and I am sure that was transferred off well before the shrimp hit the fan.

I worked at one in college for a couple years. In general, they were a bit better than some corp chains in that you got a vacation based on avg of hours worked in a week and if you wanted you could get 401k etc. if a full timer. They were also pretty generous with crew meals.

Dali Lama ate at the one in Bloomington a few times, as he had family in town.

honestly i'm impressed that red lobster stuck around as long as it did. their seafood was terrible. the only thing anybody ever seemed to have a good thing to say about there was the cheese biscuits.

"seafood"

Better than catfish places that call themselves seafood restaurants

Does anyone know the way?
There's got to be a way
To Red Lobster!

pretty interesting, fuck private equity vampires

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

I’ve ordered two lobster tails in the last year and they were delicious and the service was excellent and there were a lot of older ladies there wtf

It was never clear to me whether Red Lobster served actual lobster or something called “Red Lobster”

Never set foot in one

We used to boil live lobsters at home when I was a lad

I've always associated RL with things like 'bottomless popcorn shrimp,' maybe I'm confusing them with some other seafood shack

that's a big lobster

https://clickamericana.com/wp-content/uploads/Vintage-Red-Lobster-restaurants-1536x1024.jpg

https://clickamericana.com/wp-content/uploads/Vintage-1970s-Red-Lobster-menu-front.jpg

There used to be a competing chain called New England Oyster House, possibly only in Florida.

I have boiled crabs before. It’s not pleasant, and as with lobsters there are supposedly more humane ways of doing it nowadays.

Long John silvers ftw?

yeah, that's right.. Long John Silvers. I haven't actually seen one in years

I've boiled live crayfish (crawdads) and I felt guilty, not sure if I'd do it again

I think New England Oyster House went under shortly after they instituted their have-as-many-oysters-as-you-want-we-won't-charge-you offer.

https://i.imgur.com/55R8eIv.jpeg

Place was so ghetto.

Never been to Red Lobster. Only ever eaten lobster once, as a kid, and didn't like it at all.

This was the secret to their success:

https://i.imgur.com/JRE5Ho7.jpeg

You'd park the car, walk under the covered entranceway where all the ashtray urns were and land here in the waiting lobby. Surrounded by four dark walls, the dining room was an xanadu you could only catch a glimpse of through the corner.

Didn't matter. If you were a kid like me, you were too busy catching a glimpse of something else. Because right there underneath that painting, instead of wooden chairs, there was usually THE LOBSTER TANK.

Nice photo

Yes, my memory echoes pplains’ account. There was a crazy piece of sculpture-painting in the lobby of my local RL that I remember more clearly than the actual dining experience. But the place did seem like a relatively adult realm in the early ‘70s, somewhat less so in the ‘90s.

Thank god beefsteak Charlie’s is still in business

fond memories of going as a kid. pplains's photo looks exactly like what I remember, except that we always went for dinner

I haven't been since I was a kid, buy my mom wanted to go before they all close so we actually did go last weekend, which shattered any bit of nostalgia we had

Did you just recover enough to get out of bed for water?

ALL SEAFOOD MUST GO

My family took us to one in Marquette, MI prior to my younger brother’s hockey game. During the game he got checked into the boards and after his coach called him back, he vomited behind the bench. He played the rest of the game in a jersey with the remnants of Red Lobster shrimp scampi puke on it.

Olfactory advantage

Didn't know the bibs were supposed to be worn after the meal.

The bib is a shroud.

On the death spiral:

“When they dumped this on us in June, we’d already been squeezed to the bone,” said Malcom Clarke, then a service manager at the Red Lobster in Orem, Utah. “We got emails from corporate saying: ‘This is a free-for-all. Get that shrimp out as fast as you can.’”

Like a lot of former Red Lobster employees, Mr. Clarke speaks about the chain with a mix of anger and heartbreak. When he joined the company in 2019, it had a certain prestige. Just landing the job took months, a series of interviews and 11 weeks of training, widely considered the best in the industry. At the time, he and others talked unironically about the “Red Lobster family.” Managers spent years climbing the ladder, waiting for those on the top rung to move along or retire.

By last year, the spirit of warmth and generosity had vanished, and Endless Shrimp had made the dining room “hellish and chaotic,” as one manager put it. Some customers planted themselves there for hours, ordering nothing but shrimp and water.

“We called them campers,” said Zachary Spain, a manager at the Red Lobster in Times Square. “This one couple, they came in every Sunday, and I’d say they ate about 100 shrimp apiece, maybe 120. And we’d see people all the time, scraping shrimp into Tupperware on their lap.”

Their cheddar biscuits are solid but my mom makes a passable bootleg version so I will survive this tragedy

― Great-Tasting Burger Perceptions (Old Lunch), Monday, May 20, 2024 10:44 AM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

can you post a recipe of this?

I went once in 1986.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, May 20, 2024 11:41 AM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Same and it was in Florida too. Iirc my dad, the chef and owner of a seafood restaurant, wanted to see what one was like. It was bad but I LOVED the hush puppies. We had a Long John Silver near where I grew up but I never went. PP - staring at the lobster tank in my parents place was one of my fave things to do as a kid. I now regret not pulling an Eddie Furlong and liberating them all when I was a teen but it was like a small aquarium to me as a kid.

pouring one out for those heartbroken by the collapse of chain restaurant management culture ;_;

“This one couple, they came in every Sunday, and I’d say they ate about 100 shrimp apiece, maybe 120.

12 pound of garlic butter, Red Lobster was really bankrupted by having to restock toilet paper hourly.