Class

Red Lobster + Alain Ducasse + the fish fry

It’s 70 degrees in Vegas, proper March weather. And we had the kids at the park and somehow we all ended up at a nearby Red Lobster. 

Just the thought of a Red Lobster jiggles and trips all the mechanisms in my brain. 

When I was a kid, Red Lobster was the restaurant of excitement. We were solidly blue collar. Working class. But doing well enough. My parents had been poor, both of them. My mother was keen to remind me that I was one generation away from people who didn’t go to the store, but hunted for their food. They saved and scrimped. Mom clipped coupons.

Red Lobster was my birthday dinner. Every year. I loved the lobster tanks. I wanted to see the lobsters, get close up to their hard shells and weird insect tentacles and then once I did, I’d worry for them. Who would be killed first? The little dude in the corner or this big honking daddy? Would it hurt? Do lobsters feel?  

Mom always ordered the fried fish. We never ordered lobster because it was too expensive. But I like to think it was because I was saving them from the boil. Even though I hear the chefs at Red Lobster halve them down the middle with cleavers first before boiling. Is that just PR?

Red Lobster felt upscale. Special. Baked potatoes with copious pools of drawn butter, crab legs that I get to crack and butcher with small tools, the complimentary - the complimentary is important here - iceberg-studded salad with thick globs of Russian, a basket of warm cheddar biscuits and a small bowl of thick crab and potato-flecked chowder. It tasted like bliss every time I ate there. Absolutely the same taste, time after time, in the most sensationally consistent way possible, so as to never disappoint.

And maybe this is the crux of my entire essay: There was a time when Red Lobster never ever let me down.

Later, when I moved to NYC to do Ph.D. work at NYU, (so many initials), I fell in mad dumb love with someone from old European money. And before he cheated on me, gas lit me, ran off with the dance captain of the Broadway show we both worked on, and broke me into a thousand ugly bitter raging psychotic pieces, he took me to Alain Ducasse’s Essex House on Central Park South, with his boss and his wife - who was even older European money. And I was so dumbstruck by the opulence and straightness of it all, compounded by my own beliefs about who I was and what I deserved, that when the waiter asked me for my drink order, I couldn’t speak. Kind, affluent people at the table had to order my wine for me.

I had no idea how to eat through the silverware placement and ordered only food that felt recognizeable, except everything was written in French, so nothing was recognizeable - Where is the side salad? Where’s my fucking cup of soup? Did anyone bring the “eat two for the price of one” coupon?

You can take the girl out of the country. Etc. etc.

I ordered a bouillabaisse, which to my surprise at the time, was fish soup. I can handle fish soup. But they gave me another fucking silverware placement in the form of a fish knife, which fucked me up to no end: Do fish require special knives? Do I cut the fish in the soup? Or transfer it to the bread plate and cut it there? Of maybe just stick the fish in my mouth and cut it with my teeth?

No one ever gave me a fish knife at Red Lobster.

It was a meal of deep shame. Class shame, I suppose. An awakening that I was a spec in the universe. Soon after, before my fancy boyfriend gutted me like a striped bass, bones and flesh bits strewn around, the boyfriend took me shopping and bought me dresses that were tight and had fancy tags and prices.

I threw away my prairie skirts and cowboy boots.

There were other ways to live. I gave up on Red Lobster.

+++++

I’m so mad at my parents for making me believe that Red Lobster was the pinnacle of fine dining as a child.  I used to think that Red Lobster was the place where high class businessmen and politicians would go to get deals done. 

- Josh Cortis, Ranking the Trashiest Chain Restaurants in America, 2021. 

I’ve been reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class.  She describes the 70s and 80’s as a time when, for lots of white folks, the world felt classless. Or at least that class had a kind of identifying purpose.

I lived in a town in upstate New York that was so small everyone knew everyone’s family. I graduated with 64 other kids. There was poverty but not the Sally Struthers kind, as far as I could tell. It was hidden away. Irish curtains, my mom called it, lacy and gorgeous when closed, hiding all the unpleasantness behind them.

Most of us, whether we lived in houses, apartments or mobile homes, had mostly all the same things. Some more some less. Or that is how it felt to me. And my own beliefs as a child were simply that people who didn’t look like me or think like me existed in the same world I did, just in a parallel universe of striving around the middle class.

My only experience with abject poverty was the rural poor. In Corinth, it was the Allen family. A large extended-family clan that lived off-grid in the Adirondacks. There were stories of in-bredness, that they lived without electric and running water and married and had babies with each other. They shunned welfare and government aid. They were wary of outsiders.

But it turns out the Allens were clannish because they had been persecuted and judged by people in the town. Their existence prompted a 1993 reported piece in The New York Times. "They still tend to be a very close-knit group and they take care of each other," a social worker said. "Their ways don't change much. They're happy and that's their way of life. To you and me, our standards are much higher but they don't have those high standards and they're not striving to have them."

The article goes on to acknowledge that they policed themselves and a fire department spokesperson said: "If one of the Allens has a fire, one of the Allens next door will help put it out."

When I asked my father about the Allens, probably with a bit of middle class snobbery in my voice, true to his way, he said: “The Allens never hurt nobody. People should leave ‘em alone.”

My dad simply spoke to everyone. That was his conceit. He talked to the janitor the same way he would the CEO. That was his nod to equity. My parents believed that everyone deserved the same chance, and that everyone - and we know better now - pretty much got the same chance, and if you weren’t doing well, it was probably on you. This was the culture.

Everyone seemed to believe that the race wasn’t fixed.

Except for the people who suffered because the race was fixed.

There was no internet to tune us into all the nooks and crannies of other people’s despair or opinions or circumstances. If it didn’t make the evening news, or the Saratogian, or the Glens Falls Post Star, or the gossip mill, it probably got missed. They didn’t sell the New Yorker or the New York Times at the newsroom on Main Street, and they wouldn’t because who the fuck would buy it? We watched 60 Minutes and there we learned about civil rights activism, social justice issues, disasters, accidents, tragedies, the world’s problems, but it felt untouchable, other people’s issues, things that happened elsewhere.

We were good people.

We didn’t hurt anybody.

It’s not our fault.

The vibe - and I’m over simplifying Ehrenreich here - was that class kind of shuffled you, if you were white, into the place that best suited your abilities. My dad, for instance, never graduated from highschool. He was never going to be a scholar. But he was a talented builder and found a place in the strata of International Paper, our small town’s mill that put it on the map and made glossy paper for high end magazines like Playboy. He was able to work his way up from the pulp yard to the salaried management offices. 

Red Lobster was born out of this white middle class aspiration, for sure.

But that’s only part of it.

+++++

When they got out on land, they saw a charcoal fire in place, with fish laid out on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, 153 of them. And Although there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them,”Come and have breakfast.” 

- The bible, John 21: 1 – 14

The fish fry has deep roots in many cultures. And fried fish is the very heart and soul of any Red Lobster.

Fried fish is working people’s food. Paper plate food. Family food. The food of connection. Polish and German Catholic families fried fish on Fridays and during Lent, as did my mother. The Brits and the Aussies have their fish and chips (brought to England via Portugal by Jewish immigrants). Enslaved Black families often procured fish from bountiful lakes and rivers on Saturdays when the work day was short. The ritual stuck across generations.

“These events happen throughout the year for all sorts of occasions,” Nneka M. Okona writes in Thrillist about the fish fry tradition in the Black community, “a new baby, the Lenten gatherings known as “fish Fridays,” when family who lives far away comes into town, or if you’re clearing out your freezer and have some leftover catfish, whiting, or tilapia to share.”

Take Jim Clyburn, a democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina. Clyburn puts on his “Jim Clyburn’s World Famous Fish Fry” every year to thank donors and supporters. It’s described on his website as “tons of fried fish, the Electric Slide, and old-fashioned politicking”.

It is with all this knowledge that I head into Red Lobster on this gorgeous day in Vegas with my family: David, Desi (7), Raffi and his friend Ethan (11), Lucy and her boyfriend Carlos (18+ 20) (Edie (16) is at a friends.)

I’m holding the door for some glammed out elderly ladies. They are wearing sequins mid-day. As is Desi. The men are in jackets.

“No swearing, “ David admonishes Raffi and Ethan in a whisper, “There are old people right behind you.”

There are really a lot of older folks here. Some are white. Many are Black. All of them in church clothes. This is event dining.

I hear the ghost of my mother in my ear. She tells me that she eats the fried fish at Red Lobster because she doesn’t want to stink up the house cooking it at home.

I see it now. Red Lobster might’ve been about middle class aspiration decades ago. It might’ve felt fancy to little me. It might’ve been a night out for my parents. But at it’s core, this is working class food.

And therein lies Red Lobsters 2023 problem: It is no longer fancy enough for the middle class. But it’s too pricey for many working class families. It appeals to people who loved it through its heyday (older folks) and to people who love and remember the great joys of the fish fry but who don’t want to cook it themselves (also older folks).

Is Red Lobster is ageing itself out of existence?

+++++

I haven’t been inside a Red Lobster in years. But I want this to be good. I want it to taste so good…

But it’s not.

It’s like this Red Lobster has frayed at the edges. There is the faint smell of staleness. A burgundy rug that I’m sure conceals half of all the Vegas sins. Dark walls. Thick chunky tables. Heavy drapes. There hasn’t been a re-do of this dining room since before the aughts. It is dark, heavy, uncomfortable. Opium den meets nursing home. The only table that fits our seven-person party is a huge booth we must all stuff into.

This Red Lobster has been left behind. No attention. No care. No vibe. No story. It’s like God’s waiting room for people in sequins. A slightly tepid basket of cheddar biscuits hits the table - when did cheddar biscuits taste, well, meh? Cheddar biscuits are supposed to make you weak with their airy salty-sweet cheesiness. You are supposed to eat baskets of them so that you won’t eat so much of the all-you-can-eat shrimp and tax the margins of the restaurant.

But either my tastes have changed or these cheddar biscuits have been reheated a couple of times. I’m afraid to know.

We also get a platter of fried calamari, clearly from frozen, with little cups of dipping mayo and tomato sauce. But it’s edible enough and the kids clear the platter. Dishes in restaurants that come with all sorts of breading, dips and sauces are usually hiding that the product is frozen. There are a lot of dishes with breading, dips and sauces at The 2023 Red Lobster.

They either forget to bring us side salads and little bowls of chowder or they don’t forget and have nixed it from the menu. Inflation? Did the private equity boys nix that in their budget meetings? There is no longer king crab on the menu because people spent too long at their tables picking through it. They couldn’t turn tables over fast enough, so they 86’d it.

Their classic margarita was pure sugar and Jose Cuervo. The crispy-fried brussel sprouts were so sweet I’m sure they had been rolled in sugar, without any heat or sour funk to off set the candy.

For the first time ever, I get the lobster - fuck it, all in! Mind you, I do not order a pasta dish with lobster in it, because they’ll probably sub in the cheaper langoustine meat. No, I’m not fucking around.

I want lobster at Red Lobster.

I’m doing it right this time.

Unfortunately, the lobster was cooked to the texture of tire rubber. A waste. A dysfunction. This is depressing because what was so great about Red Lobster is the fact that it never let you down. It was always the same. Always solid. Always delivering. The bill was $200. Pretty solid for seven people, but not cheap either. Red Lobster isn’t fancy enough for the middle class, not cheap enough for the lower class.

So I ask myself: What is real here? Has Red Lobster stayed the same and I’ve changed? Or has my palate changed and this childhood favorite has stayed the same?

Maybe people still come to Red Lobster because it was the place that allowed them to feel rich once? As if they were going to their own version of the Essex House, except with food that felt comforting and familiar and a bit special?

What I’m left with is that it’s time for me to move on. I think about this while I finish my Kool-aid flavored margarita. Will I come back to Red Lobster? Maybe not. Mostly because it’s not the same. I’m not the same. The world’s not the same. And some things are better left fondly in little memory boxes, tied up with ribbon and left to acquire (magic) dust in our minds.

_________________________________

I am not the kind of writer who knows what she wants to say before she writes it. The writing tells me how I feel. This essay went in a different direction than I first thought it would.

What I do know is that after writing this I am quite sure that a community fish fry event is a great way to bring people together. Churches have been doing it for years. Here is the NY Times recipe. They advise us to have fried fish, hot sauce and lemon with a slice of bread. Maybe even a side of slaw and fries. A great way to make money for a good cause. A reason to bring people together around food in the community.

Find out how to host your own fish fry here.

Here are the sources I used for this essay:

Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, Barbara Ehrenreich.

Adirondack Hamlet Defies Time, And Help, Melinda Henneburger. New York Times, April 12, 1993.

Understanding Red Lobster’s Popularity Among Black Diners, MadameNoir, 2011.

How Fish Fries Became a Staple of Black Southern Culture: Rooted in history, dredged in cornmeal - this humble dish is far from ordinary, by Nneka M. Okona, Thrillist, January 2023.

The Real History of Fish + Chips.

It Hurts to Lose Red Lobster, But Money is Tight, LZ Granderson, CNN. 2014