Shannon’s 2-star review:
You know what, I like Red Lobster okay, and it is one of my boyfriend's all time faves in the way of chain restaurants, so I try to make sure that we go from time to time...I love seafood, and I certainly don't mind their frozen tropical cocktails...the cheddar biscuits aren't half bad, either...
But tonight I had an eye-opening experience...and the thing is, I know that Red Lobster isn't the only restaurant guilty of this American phenomenon, either, by any means...but there's one thing I really can't stand, and it's being wasteful with food.
It was really fucked up...my boyfriend ordered the "Endless Shrimp" meal, right...it sounded like a pretty good deal. Basically you can order as much shrimp as you want (all you can eat) and they bring it out to you on smaller separate plates after the initial servings on the first big plate. So for the first serving he ordered shrimp scampi and buffalo shrimp, and when he was about halfway through with that, our server asked us if we wanted to put in another order, so he ordered the shrimp linguine.
The server said that the second round takes a while to come out sometimes, so she suggested that he order another plate, too, while he was at it, so he got another buffalo shrimp...well, they ended up bringing us more than TWICE that much food, TWO more orders of shrimp scampi, and THREE more orders of buffalo shrimp. A food runner brought it all out to us, and I was just like, okay WHOA, who in the hell could eat all that?!?!?! I told him that we had actually only ordered ONE buffalo shrimp and ONE shrimp scampi, and he was like, oh well, don't worry about it, you can just have the extras, too, and you can take home what you don't finish...
Okay, fine, so I figured we'd just take it home and have dinner all set for tomorrow night...but then at the end of the meal, our regular server said, oh no, it's dine-in only, you can't take it home...
Now, HOW WASTEFUL IS THAT!!! That is so not cool in my book. I understand that they have to make it dine-in only for a deal like that, and that's not what annoyed me...what really pisses me off is that she had no problem bringing out twice as much food as we had ordered. I'm sure some people would have loved that, but not me. Wasting food is something I try to avoid at all costs, and I had absolutely no control over it in this circumstance.
Even worse, I feel like our experience translates to a really large scale problem with restaurants like this. If this happened to us, it must've been happening to other diners around us, and it probably happens every night...and again, I realize that some people actually revel in being surrounded by such a glutenous, surplus display of food...but for me, it's a model of business that I simply can't support.
Call me crazy, but I would rather pay $20 for a meal that I am able to finish at one sitting than $10 for one that I can't finish and am not allowed to take home in a doggie bag!