Red Lobster: The most mediocre of New York institutions

Is lobster fancy in the United States? No American can tell me for certain. The fact that one of the most ubiquitous chain restaurants in the US is called Red Lobster is, I try to explain to the American friends who I ask this question, surprising to your everyday Brit, because your everyday Brit finds lobster fancy. My born-and-bred New Yorker friend, hardened by an upbringing in midtown Manhattan, shook his head at me. Why would I find a “sea booger” fancy, he wanted to know? What about wagyu beef?

Red Lobster is a restaurant that divides opinion. It’s so well-known across the States that it even has a Great American Novel named after it – Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan, a man whose work is said to chronicle the poor and “the richer poor”. The New York Times review of the book finds particular pathos in the protagonist of Last Night at the Lobster thanking customers for “thinking of Red Lobster” and then immediately spiralling: ““He says this as a reflex, but what does it mean? Who, besides the people who actually work here, thinks about Red Lobster? And even they don't really think about it.”

It turns out that some people do think about Red Lobster, but they are not the people whose delight has been deadened by decades of advertising and passing by shining signs on industrial estates while driving down the freeway. Instead, they are people like my British expat friend and I, who had seen overenthusiastic commercials for “Lobster Fest” on our TV screens and had our curiosity piqued. What kind of a middle-of-the-road restaurant promising free cheesy biscuits all the way through dinner also casually offers unlimited lobster dishes during the month of February? On a cold day just after Valentine’s, we put on our biggest coats and headed down to the imposing Red Lobster outlet in Times Square, the one where a “BREAKING NEWS” style chyron announces “LIVE LOBSTER” on a continuous loop, 24 hours a day. Surely, we reasoned, this would be a decadent day.

It’s difficult to underline just how mediocre this windowless restaurant is, or how depersonalised the service can be. In America, a country where your server tells you their name before you buy an iced coffee, Red Lobster has you queue at a nondescript door, pick up a ticket with a number, and then take a lift up to another floor where you can hand in your ticket for the right to be seated. In between the first and second floor is a small, sad tank where actual live lobsters with taped-together claws move one inch to the left, one inch to the right and back again. And on the second floor, where someone finds you a booth after a five-minute wait, the ceilings are low and the walls are decorated with cave-effect wallpaper and identical prints of a singular anonymous sea scene featuring a lighthouse and a white cottage on the rocks. That, combined with the lack of windows and clocks really gives the place an odd casino vibe. As my friend said rather ominously while clutching the plastic drinks menu, “From now on, it could be any time.”

The menu you’re handed says “LOBSTERFEST” across it and the deal – a whole lobster, plus seafood linguini, fries, broccoli, and unlimited cheese biscuits for $50 – is undoubtedly value for money. Half the people in the place are looking, sallow-faced, into their bowls; the others are families asking the waiter to take a picture. And there is a comfort in the uniformity of the place, the spacious booths and the endless breads, the laidback chatter of the service staff who know full well they’re not in one of New York’s desirable places to be right now. The reviews on Yelp and TripAdvisor feature a lot of the same comment: “We came here for the bread,” and that was agreed upon by my British friend and I to be the highlight. Lobster for lunch did feel decadent, as we suspected, yet the flavours of the actual fish fell completely flat. The soupy, dense yet flavourless white sauce with shrimp was underwhelming. The broccoli side came with only four measly florets. The fries were sad and a bit undercooked. It began to feel almost morally wrong to sit and pick at a whole lobster with so little ceremony, while checking our phones every five or so minutes for work updates.

Somehow, it was true that the cheese biscuits got us through the meal. I’d probably go back for them tomorrow. But as I passed the small tank of live lobster as we left via the stairs, I knew in my heart that I’d never go back – not when so many of those poor lobsters gave so much for so little.