They say the shrimp did it.
Were the shrimp simply too irresistible? Or were diners’ appetites (for shellfish, yes, but also for a dazzling bargain) just too cavernous?
On a night last week, when I arrive at a still-open location in suburban Suitland, Md., the shrimp is not all-you-can-eat. Still, it is plentiful. The scampi swim in a little ceramic bathtub of pungent parsley-flecked butter and garlic. The butterflied, breadcrumb-coated fried variety are crisp, ready to be dunked by the tail in ramekins of horseradish-spiked cocktail sauce. For $17, you can order two styles: They also come flavored with coconut flakes or Mexican street corn, “dragon” spiced, skewered and grilled, or blanketed in Alfredo sauce atop linguine. Sure, the little guys might not be ocean-fresh (they were probably frozen, like much of the seafood we eat), but they are … pretty good, or at least the crowd seems to think so.
With the smell of melted butter and the sound of Britney Spears’s coo in the air, I find it hard to believe that this seafood party could end at any time, and that this location, with its view of full parking lots and Chevrolet dealerships stretching in two directions, could be the scene of what has played out at other locations around the country, with apologetic notes taped to doors and workers loading out furniture and equipment for auction. Here, about three miles southeast of Washington, D.C., the margaritas are still beach-bucket-size, and those pillowy-salty cult-favorite Cheddar Bay Biscuits are flowing. (A winking server promises an extra delivery to make up for a long wait.)
There’s a couple on a date that seems to be going well; after the appetizers come, she moves over to sit next to him on the booth bench, and his arm snakes around her back. A table of women has gathered for a ladies’ night dinner, and the group orders a round of many-hued margaritas. There’s no way to clink these glasses in a toast; you have to lean over them to slurp from a straw, which they do. The bar is full.
It’s easy to see how the lure of endless shrimp, though, took a pinch out of Red Lobster’s bottom line. On TikTok, people shared their epic evenings devouring hundreds of shrimp for only $20, after the chain made what had been a limited-time deal a permanent fixture. On Reddit, people gamed out how to get the most out of the special. They boasted of body counts in the hundreds, of getting shooed out by fed-up servers delivering successive plates of seafood with ever-louder thunks of platters.
As the 1990s ads for the chain used to say, “Wow, that’s a lot of shrimp!”
To Michael Kaufman, a former restaurant chain executive and Harvard Business School lecturer, the run on the endless-shrimp offer was just another burden for the chain, which was already facing steep challenges, such as rising food and labor costs, and lower traffic from consumers feeling pinched. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.
The company had been bitten in the past by an all-you-can-eat special gone awry. In 2003, it advertised a special on crab, and the resulting swarm lost the company so much money that it prompted the departure of then-President Edna Morris.
It’s not quite time to write Red Lobster’s obituary. Experts say the brand could very well emerge from this round of downsizing and bankruptcy with a significant national presence intact. And so we come not to bury the Lobster, but to remember it.
Which would, of course, include those TV spots, many diners’ introduction to the chain. The commercials were pageants of lemon wedges being squeezed and splashing butter — so, so much butter. Many starred wholesome families digging into seafood feasts, but some of the most memorable were downright seductive, like one from 1990: The restaurant’s signature jingle (“Red Lobster for the seafood lover in youuuuu”) played as a smoldering torch song while the shrimp’s butter bath burbled. “Scaaampi,” the narrator practically purrs.
The ads were so distinctive that they were even spoofed in a 2017 short horror film starring “Gilded Age” stars Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector. (In the 2022 period drama, they play husband and wife, but in this, she’s a customer trapped in a 1990s Red Lobster commercial, and he’s the menacing waiter.) The film seems to have disappeared from streaming platforms, alas, but in bootlegged versions, you can see that the means of violence include melted butter.
Throughout the decades, the chain has undergone various reinventions. In 2007, it dropped the tagline “For the seafood lover in you” in favor of “Come see what’s fresh today,” as part of a shift to emphasize its fresh-fish offerings instead of the fried dishes it had long been known for. In 2011, it underwent a redesign that invoked the nautical aesthetic of Bar Harbor, Maine (think signal flags, Adirondack chairs and maritime art), a move meant to echo its highlighting of the “flavors of America.” In 2018, it brought out smaller seafood “tasting plates” and dishes with global flavors.
Of late, Red Lobster has indulged in some cringey youth-oriented marketing, including attempting in a TV ad to capitalize on the viral TikTok audio clip of gospel singer Shirley Caesar, in which the singer praises “beans, greens, potatoes, tomatoes, you name it!” The chain hired her to sing, in a similar cadence, the makeup of its lobster-and-shrimp promotion: “tails, shrimp, waiters, potatoes …” And, inexplicably, in April, it introduced a playlist of artificial-intelligence-generated songs celebrating Cheddar Bay Biscuits (sample track: “Cheddar Bay Bouncin’ II”).
For all that effort, in recent years, the chain seemed to whiff on a gift from the marketing gods. No less a pop goddess than Beyoncé mentioned the chain in her hit 2016 single “Formation,” the lyrics of which suggested that if her lover, ahem, pleased Queen Bey, he would be rewarded with a visit to Red Lobster. It took the brand a full eight hours (a lifetime in social media time) to respond. And when it did, the engagement it offered was, in the collective judgment of the internet, pretty lame.
Behind the scenes, management moves and market forces are what put it in its tenuous spot, experts say. The chain was founded in Florida in 1968 by restaurant giant Bill Darden and enjoyed a long stretch of growth, first under the umbrella of General Mills, which spun the chain off in 1995 under the new Darden Restaurants company. For many people in landlocked towns, Red Lobster was an introduction to the exotic world of lobster tails, snow crab legs and, of course, shrimp.
But as its sister restaurant, Olive Garden, soared, Red Lobster faltered, and the restaurant group sold the seafood chain in 2014 to private equity firm Golden Gate Capital for $2.1 billion. Its supplier, Thai Union Group, eventually became its biggest shareholder. That structure proved problematic: According to the company’s bankruptcy filing this week, former CEO Paul Kenny went ahead with the decision to make the endless shrimp a permanent menu item, over the objections of the management team. And the filing claims that Kenny “circumvented” the usual process and sourced the shrimp from — you guessed it — Thai Union, a move that dinged Red Lobster.
And Stephen Zagor, a restaurant consultant and professor at Columbia Business School, says the ownership might not be as committed to the core of what Red Lobster does. “They’re not doing it to be in the restaurant business,” he says. “They’re in it to make money.”
He says that, as Red Lobster raised its menu prices, it became less of a deal for diners, who have plenty of other choices, including the proliferating range of fast-casual spots: “They became too much a part of American wallpaper.”
And the problem might not be just Red Lobster’s, but that of all casual sit-down restaurants. Menu prices in the category are up some 20 percent since 2021, in the face of higher costs on a variety of things, such as labor and napkins, and customers are starting to balk, according to data from researcher Technomic.
Some are offering deals to lure them back in — such as Red Lobster’s endless shrimp, which turned out to be the miscalculation on top of the cherry. The company not only underestimated how much people would eat, but it also overestimated how much other business it would drive.
“Those calculations,” Kaufman says, “just didn’t square with what the consumer did.”
I can relate. In Suitland, the meal has ended, and a server delivers containers for our leftovers. The shrimp from my seafood feast is long gone, and so are the lobster tails. And I decide not to toss in the tangle of crab legs I couldn’t polish off.
But those cheesy, addictive biscuits go directly into the box. After all, I don’t know when I might have them again.
