Stephen Anderson

Red Lobster Menu

It was great in the test kitchen , but would it work in the high-octane atmosphere of a busy restaurant?

That's the question Tom Vogel and his culinary team at Red Lobster asked as they neared completion of the menu overhaul that earned the seafood chain the 1999 MenuMasters Award for Best Menu Revamp.

"What you make in a test kitchen may not always work in a restaurant that is serving 1,000 guests a night," says Vogel, vice president of food and beverage for Darden Restaurants' Red Lobster chain.

"We worked a lot of Friday and Saturday nights in the restaurants to feel what they felt," Vogel adds. "As a result, we made a number of changes."

One thing they discovered was that the menu section called "Seafood in Every Bite Pasta" needed modification. "We had to simplify this area because of the sheer volume of pastas that were going through the restaurant," Vogel says.

The Red Lobster menu revamp evolved over several years. The objective was to refresh the brand and make customers aware that Red Lobster was offering a much broader variety of food than it had in the past.

"There are many people who still think of us as serving mostly fried foods like we did in the 1970's," Vogel explains. "Today we serve a lot that's not fried. We're known for lobsters, crab and fresh fish as well as pastas and combinations."

New and innovative items include hot lobster fondue, a blend of lobster and cheddar cheese served in a bread bowl, and shrimp bruschetta, sour dough crisps topped with shrimp and cheeses served with tomato-basil relish.

It was a much needed revitalization, according to Janet Lowder, president of the Los Angeles consulting firm of Restaurant Management Services. "After all these years, a revamp was definitely in order. Obviously, they know how to handle seafood, which can be very tricky, but consumers perceived them as being in the lower end of the mid-range of seafood restaurants."

But that's changing, Lowder says. "This puts them in the higher end of this middle group and lets them compete rather well against these more higher-end seafood restaurants."

Red Lobster's 15-member food and beverage team is split into two groups. Chefs and developers focus on creating new menu items and are led by executive chef Steve Anderson and food and beverage director Kurt Hankins. Operations Support takes the recipes and re-creates them for the restaurants. The groups work together in the Red Lobster portion of Darden's culinary center in Orlando, Fla.

"We challenged ourselves to create a menu that would inspire the passion of our restaurant crew and managers," Vogel said. "We decided that the only items we would roll out nationally would be the ones our test restaurants in Tampa, Fla., and Cincinnati would not let us take away."

The culinary team went in with 15 new items and rolled out nine. "Restaurants were passionate about those nine," Vogel notes. "That process -- allowing restaurants to say what menu items they wanted to keep -- helped us be very focused nationally."

Big menu winners thus far include the "Seafood in Every Bite Pasta" and "Crabby Monday" -- all-you-can-eat crabs for $14.95.

Red Lobster also is highlighting its "Fresh Fish" section, a selection of fish that changes daily. "Actually, we've been flying fresh fish overnight from the docks to our restaurants for many, many years," says Vogel, "but a lot of people think we only serve frozen fish out of the freezer."

The Red Lobster revamp, which included new menu designs and plateware, was launched during September and November of 1998, a two-part process that let the restaurants phase items in gradually.

The first step was to train the regional trainers. The Operations Support team then developed detailed training aids with color photos that gave Red Lobster's 670 restaurants step-by-step instructions for preparing and serving the food.

How does the chain measure success? "Well, our guest satisfaction scores for taste and appearance showed double-digit increases over last year," Vogel says.