Something is Rotten in the State of Oklahoma

PART I             

            Against my better judgment, I ate lunch at a Red Lobster the other day.  It was awful.  I knew that it was going to be awful.  It’s always BEEN awful, but I wasn’t the one choosing the restaurant and sometimes in life you have to put up with some vile, terrifying, insanely unappealing stuff.  That’s just the way it goes.

                 Somewhere between viewing the saddest sight a chain restaurant has to offer (the choose-your-own lobster tank in the lobby of these monstrosities that shellfish call Death Row) and asking my waitress to define the corporate parameters that define the word “fresh” in the menu of an Oklahoma seafood restaurant that’s, at best, nine states away from Maine, I had a revelation.  I experienced a moment of clarity, when everything fell into place like the best game of Tetris you ever played.  I had a shining, bright-to-the-point-of-blinding, staring-at-a-solar-eclipse thought (that I now realized I should have thought years ago).  I had the glorious idea---Red Lobster sucks. 

                 I’ll amend that.  Almost all chain restaurants suck. 

                 I’ll make an exception for Waffle House, even though I’m pretty sure that I’ve never eaten there sober. 

                 And, for some inexplicable reason, I’ll make an exception for Taco Bell.  I crave their crap even though I know that it’s Grade D beef, freeze dried lettuce, and their menu has the ethnic authenticity of Beijing soul food. 

EXHIBIT A---The Lobster Tank

                 Most chain restaurants don’t have the courage to display your food in its final moments.  Red Lobster does.  After hamstringing their only means of defense (rubber banding the claws), the sadists at Red Lobster make your dinner parade around in front of you as if the lobsters want you to boil them alive and then dip their limbs in melted butter.  That takes moxie and a shared willingness to overlook the inherent depravity.  Outback Steakhouse doesn’t keep a pen full of live cows outside their doors.  Popeye’s doesn’t let you pick which terrified chicken in which tiny torture box you want from off the back of one of its trucks.  Those places at least have the decency to play along with the willing suspension of disbelief that is as much a part of the modern eatery as the angry cook or silverware rolled in cloth napkins.

                 And why does Red Lobster feel the need to put thick rubber bands around the claws of its inmates?  They could just as easily put a lid on the tank, but no.  Red Lobster keeps an open tank, giving the customer the warm, fuzzy feeling that their lunch is enjoying its final moments on Earth.  They keep an open tank because they think that we’re all complete morons.  They think that, as we’re waiting to be seated, our children will be so two-by-four-to-the-head stupid that they’ll reach into a tank of crippled, live crustaceans and try to play with the least pet-like creatures this side of a slug farm.  They might be right.  Our kids might really be that dumb, but it’s still pretty condescending.

                While we’re on the subject, why do they only have lobster tanks?  Red Lobster serves crab.  They serve salmon.  They even serve “fresh” salads.  But there’s no crab barrel.  There’s no salmonquarium.  There’s no “fresh” vegetable garden where you can hear your lettuce scream as they slice into it and mix it with some cucumber slices which haven’t been “fresh” since the mid-90s.  I know that the lobster is their signature menu item.  That’s fairly obvious from the name.  Still, it seems somehow unfair to only torture your biggest seller. 

                 I really hate this restaurant.  I don’t actually live in Oklahoma, but I want to make a point.  Red Lobster sucks…and in more ways than one.