Although this restaurant chain has shown staying
power and it continues to be popular, Red Lobster is not high on my ‘go to’
list of restaurants. Still, they’d been
bombarding our TV screen with commercials pushing their “limited time only”
“Lobster Fest”. So what’s a guy to do
when he needs to do what he needs to do!
We even had a little $4.00 coupon…
This is the Red Lobster in Knoxville
Tennessee. Red Lobster opened its first
location back in 1968. General Mills
bought the company in 1970 and greatly expanded it. Darden Restaurants Inc. bought Red Lobster
from General Mills in 1995. Currently,
there are about 674 Red Lobster restaurants operating in the United States.
Darden Restaurants Inc. also owns a few
other familiar restaurants… The largest and best known is Olive Garden (786
locations); then there is LongHorn Steakhouse (386 locations); Bahama Breeze
(30 locations); Season 52 (23 locations); the upscale Capital Grille (46
locations, and; Eddie V’s Prime Seafood (11 locations). Sales/revenues in 2011 were $7,500,200,000
and the company employed roughly 180,000 people!
This is the bar area…and Laurie did order
a before dinner Vodka and Tonic, tall with 2 lime wedges. Other than the fact that drink as delivered
was short, not tall, it did contain Vodka and 2 lime wedges!
The dining area was OK…although I did
think that it could us a bit of a facelift.
Despite this photo showing empty booths, the restaurant was quite
busy. We had a 10 minute wait at 4:30 PM
on a Sunday afternoon.
Our waitress started us out with 5 nice
Cheddar Bay Biscuits! We’d just
experienced these great biscuits at Big Dude and Bev’s house the previous week.
(http://bigdudesramblings.blogspot.com)
Red Lobster markets the mix and Bev had wanted to see if they’d come out as
nicely from the mix as they do in the restaurant. She made hers a little bigger and they were
excellent!
This was Laurie’s salad. I thought that the salads were just so so… There
were too many big chunks of iceberg lettuce, just a couple of croutons, a bit
of tomato and a little cucumber, plus a spinach leaf or two.
As I mentioned at the start, Laurie
really likes Lobster and she’s done a great job of putting up with me…so this
is the meal that I envisioned for her from Red Lobster’s “Lobster Fest”
menu! It’s the Lobster Lover’s Dream
($29.99)
The meal consisted of a rock lobster tail
plus a split Maine lobster tail, roasted and served with a side of lobster and shrimp
linguini Alfredo. Laurie had ordered the
petite green beans but the kitchen got the order wrong and she ended up with a ‘free’
premium side of asparagus, normally an extra $2.25. The asparagus was cooked just right too! She didn't mind at all!
While this wasn’t fresh lobster from
Maine or Atlantic Canada, Laurie really enjoyed her meal. (However, she did mention that she could have
eaten a couple additional lobster tails…) She didn’t really taste the lobster
in the linguini…thought it was crab and shrimp…but she did enjoy it as well, though couldn't eat it all!
This was my Red Lobster entrée… I went
with the ‘healthy’ dinner! This is the
Admiral’s feast. ($17.99) It included Walt’s favorite shrimp, bay scallops,
clam strips and flounder…and to accompany this fried feast, I added French
fried potatoes.
Everything was quite good…with the 8 fried
shrimp leading the way! The flounder was
nice too. The bay scallops are the tasty
small round bits mixed in with the fried clam strips. I went with cocktail sauce vs. the usual tatar sauce. My only negative is that there were more
fried clam bits than there were fried clam strips… There was certainly plenty
of food to eat!
The ambience or lack thereof was a bit of
a turnoff. Service was adequate although
both Laurie’s drink and her veggie were misses…even though the latter was in
our favor. Red Lobster #0047 is located
at 8040 Kingston Pike in Knoxville Tennessee.
Phone: 865-693-4651. Red Lobster’s
website is at www.redlobster.com.
Just click on any of the photos to
enlarge them…
Thanks for stopping by and experiencing
this long lived restaurant chain with us!
Take Care, Big Daddy Dave
Looks like you had a good experience and better than my visit a couple years ago for Seafoodfest. Of course, it looked delicious on TV, loaded with nice big portions of seafood. It was a great disappointment as, for example, the lobster tail was just barely larger than a jumbo shrimp and nothing was particularly tasty. It inspired me to learn to cook good seafood at home, plus the biscuits were delicious and this is when Bev began making them, so it was worth the trip.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad your visit was a near hit :-). The RL in our area is a total disaster, so bad that the Silver Fox insists the chain should pay us to eat there. One of the problems with large franchises is the unevenness that is encountered from one location to the next. It's always good to know there are good ones out there. Have a wonderful weekend, Dave. Blessings...Mary
ReplyDeleteI don't eat fish but I love lobster. These dishes look very appetizing. You sure know how to find good eataries. Have a nice Sunday Dave!
ReplyDeleteMaine lobster is the finest luxury in the world if it's real Maine lobster. What do you think?
ReplyDelete