Say goodbye forever to this Red Lobster menu item that caused “chaos” in their restaurants

Battling back from bankruptcy earlier this year, Red Lobster is hoping Damola Adamolekun, the company’s new CEO, will be able to bring them back to a prominent position in the US restaurant business. The chain filed for bankruptcy in May 2024 and was forced to shutter nearly 100 locations. A miscalculation caused the company to lose millions when customers happily paid $20 for Endless Shrimp, which was bad for business, bad for staff and bad for customers in the end.

“You stress out the kitchen. You stress out the servers. You stress out the host. People can’t get a table,” Adamolekun told CNN. The new CEO would love to find a way to bring back the popular promotion, but he says shrimp is “very expensive product to give away endlessly.”

The new CEO was hired to make Red Lobster profitable again and the endless shrimp deal does just the opposite. “I never want to say never, but certainly not the way that it was done,” he told CNN. “We won’t have it in a way that’s losing money in that fashion and isn’t managed.”

The new items on Red Lobster’s menu:

In an interview with Today, Adamolekun said how he thinks customers will react to the new menu. “I expect a stampede into our restaurants because we’re bringing back the hush puppies,” he said. “I stopped going to Red Lobster because they stopped the hush puppies. Since I was in college I love the hush puppies. I’m glad they’re back.”

Although customers may be disappointed the endless shrimp deal isn’t coming back, restaurant employees aren’t sad to see it go. “You had groups coming in expecting to feed their whole family with one order of endless shrimp,” an anonymous worker from a Red Lobster located in Kansas City said in an article published in Slate. “I would get screamed at,” she said. “It tops any customer service experience I’ve had. Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.”