Red Lobster: The most mediocre of New York institutions

Lobster for lunch should be a decadent delight. But the best thing on the menu was the cheese biscuits, says first-time visitor Holly Baxter, who won’t be rushing back

The restaurant divides opinion (I Laslovarga CC BY-SA 3.0)

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.”