New restaurants come and go, hundreds of them over the years. People around here get very excited about the newcomers. And yet, it’s never quite enough. It won’t ever be.
Julie Haynes has something new in the works at the former Coco Bolos. They’re opening a Beef-A-Roo, whatever that is, on the west side, and a Mexican joint just opened at the old Burger King in Aggieville. Hawaiian Bros. is on its way. College kids lined up around the block for a new Culver’s awhile back.
Great. Whatever the next one, people will get excited.
But whenever there’s an opening, whenever a new project starts, somebody cracks the same joke:
Red Lobster. Which is funny. Always good for a laugh. But there’s something else going on there, too, something about the unattainable.
Now there’s a bankruptcy in the works, and so it seems like it will never happen, and maybe it will entirely disappear.
So, in the interest of public service, we went there for dinner.
What follows is an account of that experience, and some reflections on the bigger picture.
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Last time I remember dinner at Red Lobster, I was a senior at Manhattan High, driving over to Topeka with my buddies, trying to impress our dates with a fancy dinner. High-class.
I was reminded by one of those buddies recently that there was an episode of mooning passing traffic on the way home. So the effort to class it up went, ahem, out the window. Wasn’t me. Promise.
Maybe we cursed the entire community with that episode. Dunno.
But, perhaps in some sort of penance, or perhaps just for the sake of a good story, I took another crack at it. About four decades later.
I was still trying to impress my date, but fortunately I had hoodwinked her into marrying me. Side note: Angie also made the trek to the Lobster in Topeka on senior skip day at Manhattan High in 1988. The Topeka Zoo was also involved. She didn’t mention mooning.
We’ve lived a lot of life since those days.
But going to a seafood restaurant here in the Midwest remains a rarity, and for those of us raised in Manhattan, going to Red Lobster remains sort of a voyage into the exotic. Plus, I love seafood, and, when it comes to dinners out, I’ve always been a bit shellfish.
Bah-dum-dum. Thank you. I’m here all week. I could give you some other story, but I’m sure my rationale would sound a bit fishy.
Anyhoo, we brought Hannah, the 24-year-old, with us. We were meeting a couple friends whose 17-year-old son had been to the Lobster every year for his birthday since he was 8. His choice. Point is, these were not armchair cynics.
And that’s good. As loyal Manhattan people, Angie and I could be accused of a certain sour-grapiness. Too good for our hometown, huh? Well, take a long walk on a short plank.
That’s the major conundrum of this entire project. What am I doing here? Writing a straight-up review? Writing a snarky sour-grapes putdown? Offering a history lesson? A travel log? A Dad-joke tour-de-force?
The answer is yes. And ultimately sort of a life lesson. So let’s dive in.
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Into Lobster-Land we plunged, freestyling past the tank of big live ones in front.
Which brought up another conundrum, immediately: A steamed fresh lobster with drawn butter and lemon has been my favorite food ever since Grandma and Pop Pop treated us to them in Long Island when Jay and I were kids. But ordering one of those would, first of all, bust the budget and, second, limit my review to one item that’s, frankly, pretty hard to screw up.
I went instead with some sort of seafood bonanza combo, including a Maine lobster tail, some grilled scallops, shrimp scampi and shrimp linguini alfredo.
The 17-year-old stumbled right into another conundrum. Surf and turf? Well, sure. Sounds good. But why are you ordering steak at a seafood place? Unlike me, he bulled forward.
Wait. I’m getting ahead of the narrative.
They immediately brought us a basket of hot rolls, these biscuit things with cheese baked into them. Gotta say, they’re outrageously good. All snarkiness aside, I could eat pounds of the damn things. I didn’t, since I’m no longer 18, but… well, this is the conundrum. You’re here to eat seafood, right? Why stuff yourself to the gills with bread before the actual meal? Same conundrum every time at Olive Garden with those breadsticks. Must be a corporate edict: Stuff them with carbs first!
We skipped appetizers, partly because of the rolls and partly because I was ordering the bonanza and the other dad in the group was ordering endless shrimp. It’s the Forrest Gump option: Shrimp scampi, spicy shrimp, shrimp alfredo, skewered shrimp, coconut shrimp, and something called Walt’s Favorite shrimp.
The ladies went for a salad and then split an order of snow crab legs. See, this was another dilemma. Crab? Absolutely. But if I’m going crab, I’m going king. Snow crabs just make me mad. So much work, so little meat. No king on the menu, so that was that. Besides, I knew Angie would share a bite. This is our deal — we always share, which basically means I eat a pretty good portion of hers.
Hannah ordered fried fish and fries; she would’ve ordered a fried lemonade if we’d have let her. But that’s another story.
She might have made the best pick.
The letdown started when the entrees arrived. The salads were passable, but, well, let’s start with the steak. Don’t order a steak at a seafood place. That was the 17-year-old’s comment. He was also excited about the bacon mac-n-cheese side — but it was sorta bland goo with what appeared to be Bac-O’s sprinkled throughout.
The other dad and I agreed that the shrimp scampi was good, maybe the best of the entire catch. My lobster tail was rubbery and flavorless, a toddler’s teething ring. The scallops had some grill flavor, to be charitable, but the linguine alfredo tasted like wallpaper paste. (Side note: How do I know what wallpaper paste tastes like? That’s what a tour guide in Hawaii asked one time in response to the common refrain about the taste of poi. I haven’t used that simile since then, but, well, it just seems about right.)
Angie asked for a mini-fork to save her knuckles in the wrestling match with the crab legs, which — to be fair — were tasty. The waitress — a friendly young lady — actually said: “I don’t think we have any because people keep stealing them.”
(Marketing pitch, in the event Manhattan wants to make another run at a franchise, if the whole enterprise doesn’t sink: “Hey, we won’t steal your forks!”)
To her credit, she came up with one a few minutes later, saying she’d washed it herself.
She later recommended a brownie dessert, then, when we asked for it, said they were out. Not kidding.
Both desserts we ordered were, in fact, good. O
ne was a chocolate cake; the other, strawberry cheesecake.
The whole deal set us back $275 for six people, which would’ve started a financial panic in 1986, when I was 18. But, particularly since I had bought a gift card to get quadruple fuel points at Dillons, didn’t seem outrageous.
Dinner, a couple rounds of drinks for the adults, dessert…can’t complain much about price.
It was also plenty. We were stuffed.
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I’m trying to remember. What’s this about again?
It’s about envy, I suppose, or resentment. In the 1990s, Red Lobster wanted to move into a building in the mall parking lot, sort of like Chili’s and Texas Roadhouse. But the lease that the city government has with the mall allowed the anchor tenants — Dillards, predominantly — to veto it; they wanted to protect their parking.
Then Red Lobster, or at least a commercial real estate guy representing them, tried to buy a lot owned by the city in an industrial area east of Tuttle Creek Boulevard, about where all those restaurants on McCall now sit. But they lowballed the offer, and the city rejected the bid.
People ever since have asked: When are we getting a Red Lobster? Every time a new building goes up or a restaurant opens, the rumor surfaces. At this point, it’s just a punchline, a reliable laugh.
Truth is, though, the parent company has indicated various ways that Manhattan isn’t a big enough market, or doesn’t have the right demographics. To be clear, government and Chamber of Commerce people say that they don’t actually go after restaurants.
They go after big employers; restaurants come on their own, if they want to, based on free-market factors. That philosophy could change, I suppose, but that’s a slippery slope. Are you going to throw tax breaks at Red Lobster but not, say, Spin Pizza? And if you go after them, what are you going to do for Vista? And so on.
So we are where we are, landlocked, no sea here since the dinosaurs. And no seafood, or at least no Red Lobster.
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