Red Lobster followed up its endless shrimp fiasco with another stunt: all-you-can-eat lobster

The Times Square Red Lobster restaurant. Keith Bedford/Reuters

• Red Lobster announced another “endless” offering: all-you-can-eat lobster.
• But, only 150 customers nationwide scored the deal, which became available on Tuesday.
• The bargain comes after the company reported record losses last year, partly thanks to its endless shrimp offering.

Just months after admitting that its endless shrimp offering led to record losses, Red Lobster is trying out a surprisingly similar stunt: all-you-can-eat lobster.

But, before you get too excited, the offering is only available to 150 customers — and they’ve all already been chosen, the company said on its social media channels.

Even if you were lucky enough to snag the Lobsterfest deal, which became available on Tuesday, there are a number of caveats that make the feast not-so-endless.

Red Lobster announced the Endless Lobster Experience in a press release last week — weeks after its minority investor Thai Union Group announced plans to sell its stake in the struggling restaurant chain.

“We’re not expecting to get anything much from the sale,” Thai Union Group CEO Thiraphong Chansiri said during the company’s earnings call on Monday, according to a transcript of the call compiled by AlphaSense.

Red Lobster has been struggling in part because of its last all-you-can-eat seafood offering: a $20 endless shrimp deal, with no time limit, that the company made available every day of the week last summer.

That offer brought in twice as much customer traffic as the company expected, Business Insider previously reported.

Thai Union Group reported around an $11 million loss from Red Lobster operations for Q3 of last year — and the company acknowledged at the time that the losses from the endless shrimp deal were a key contributing factor. The company in Feburary also reported a loss of around $12.5 million in Q4 from its Red Lobster operations, though it did not specifically tie the loss to the restaurant chain’s shrimp offering.

The restaurant chain seems to have learned, at least a little, from its endless shrimp fiasco — this time around, the “endless” lobster will be limited to two hours, to only 150 winning customers across the country, and to a maximum of 12 of its 1¼-pound live Maine lobsters followed by Maine lobster tails or Caribbean Rock lobster tails.

The national lobster promotion is an expansion of an endless lobster experience the restaurant chain held only at its New York Times Square location in March 2023.