My Red Lobster experience:

I'm always on the lookout for a restaurant suitable for the
entertainment of friends, preferring to eat there first, alone, in
order to get a feel for the place. I stopped yesterday at a new eatery
written up in a review as this fantastic new must-visit spot that
turned out to be little more than a snack bar. So I skipped it in
favor of the local Red Lobster, which I'd been driving past for the
better part of a decade without going in (call it intuition).

Suppertime and there was no wait for a table, which can sometimes be a
tipoff to a ripoff, if you know what I mean. And prices were
unexpectedly high. Most meals fell in the $25 to $30 range. I ordered
a meal with lobster, $30.

Salad and biscuits came first, along with the only drinkable craft-like
brew (bottled) on the menu. The others were oversweet/underbitter
beers like Bud, Miller and Coors, along with their lite/light lo-cal
versions (no Guinness). I saw they also had a lot of girly drinks like
pina coladas, tequila sunrises and the like. No bar. Hard-sell on the
drinks.

The biscuits were good, but I only sampled and saved the rest for the
meal. A practice engaged in by many restaurants is to load people up
on bread/rolls/biscuits, salad and drinks in order to get away with
serving modest-sized main courses to people with appetites already
spoiled.

The salad was a disappointment - a small bed of lettuce with way too
much dressing on it, topped with two thin slices from a small tomato,
two onion rings (one slice of onion broken into rings), two thin slices
of cucumber, and seven croutons. Again, I picked at this and sipped my
beer in order not to fill up before the main course.

Comes the lobster, a tail about the size of your basic boot heel, and a
close cousin to a boot heel, as it turned out. Five other items on the
plate were a reasonably good baked potato, a small wedge of lemon, a
tiny syrup dish containing butter for dipping, a serrated steak knife,
and that tiny fork one imagines lies on the tables of Lilliput's
Big-endians and Little-endians alike (I promise, this will be my only
reference to Gulliver's Travels).

The lobster needed that serrated steak knife, which means this was a
case of culinary malice aforethought. I mean, it took some effort to
cut and I was afraid the whole time that I'd slip up and inadvertently
sweep the entire meal off the plate. I was reminded of a steak I'd
ordered at Shari's, but mercifully the lobster arrived without the
generous portion of gristle in what passes for steak at Shari's.
Apparently the cook hasn't learned (yet) how to add gristle to lobster.
Too bad the prison work-release bus let him off here instead of a place
with a... hello! cooking school.

I was able to chew-up and choke-down about half of the lobster before
simply giving up. The dipping butter must have been been on the stove
for days because it had that heated-too-hot-for-too-long off-taste.
The whole time I was wishing I could be elsewhere, maybe eating
hospital food or back in Vietnam for another three tours eating
C-Rations... ummmm, salty ham and lima beans.

$36 and change plus a tip later I'm out of there, mentally crossing Red
Lobster off my list. The best thing that happened was listening to a
couple of city council members in the next booth (having supper before
that evening's public meeting) mocking citizens and their concerns.
It's amazing what comes up while people eat. Well, anyway, I had
nothing "come up," but I woke up at 2am and laid awake until 5am
dealing with digestion or lack thereof.

In a 5-star world, the only star here was a (fake) starfish in the live
lobster tank. Hey, wait a minute, did that thing move?

I'll have good reason now to continue driving past Red Lobster without
stopping in. Like many lessons learned these days, it was expensive,
but at least I wasn't trying to be a cheerful host treating guests to
dinner. That's why I eat alone at a restaurant before entertaining
guests there.