New owners add more seafood to Red Lobster menu
The pork chops are being deep-sixed at Red Lobste♎r.
The struggling chain on Monday plans to announce another revamped menu that removes dishꦺes including Spicy Tortilla Soup and a Wood-G🥂rilled Pork Chop, while tacking on more dishes featuring, well, lobster.
The move to increase seafood to 85 percent of the menu from 75 percent is the first major move by San Francisco’s private equity firm Golden Gate Capital, which bought the 706-location eatery from Darden Restaurants in August fo📖r $2.1 billion.
Golden Gate hopes the moves rev♓erse a downward trend at Red Lobster.
In the nine months ended Feb. 23 — the latest figures available — same-store sales at Red Lobster fell 6.2 percent from the previous year. So Golden Gate apparently has opted to go back to the 46-year-old chain’s root𝄹s.
“At the end of the day, we believe that seafood is really why people co꧋me to Red Lobster,” Salli Setta, Red Lobster’s president, told AP in a phone interview.
Red 🐠Lobster says the menu will be easier to navigate and feature more photos of the food. Four of the five new dishes include lobster, and it’s increasing the amount of shrimp in the popular “Ultimate Feast” platter by 50 percent. The price of the dish, which also includes lobster and crab, will go up by a dollar to $26.99.
Whether its new menu will win back customers remains to be seen, with people increasingly heading to chains like Chipotle, where they feel they can get high-𓆉quality food without paying as much.
Other changes had already been in the works.
CEO Kim Lopdrup, who is back at Red Lobster after serving as its president from 2004 to 2011, has said steep discounting like “30 shrimp for $11.99” was a mistake. The chain this summer also started changing the way it plates its dishes, with fish piled over rice instead of having foods spread out on a dish. Red Lobster says that pres👍entation is more visuallꦦy appealing, while also helping retain the food’s heat.
Additional reporting by the Associated Press