Red Lobster is a mess. Here's why the new 35-year-old CEO wanted the job anyway

TikToks of customers stuffing their faces with a US$20 endless shrimp. More than 100 restaurant closures and thousands of layoffs. A revolving door of CEOs. Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

TikToks of customers stuffing their faces with a US$20 endless shrimp. More than 100 restaurant closures and thousands of layoffs. A revolving door of CEOs. Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Damola Adamolekun, the new chief executive of Red Lobster, is taking over a chain in turmoil. And he’s only 35.

“There’s a hole to climb out of, for sure, and that will be the hardest part,” Adamolekun told CNN last Friday in his first on-camera interview as CEO over lobster tail, snow crab legs, garlic shrimp scampi, crispy dragon shrimp and cheddar bay biscuits.

“It’s been a painful period in bankruptcy, and the closures have affected a lot of people,” he said as couples and families began trickling into the remodeled — but largely nondescript — Red Lobster in a Long Island, New York, outlet mall, complete with a tank of lobsters at the entrance, a bar and friendly waitstaff.

Adamolekun, born in Nigeria to a neurologist and a pharmacist, was raised in Zimbabwe and the Netherlands before moving to Springfield, Ill., when he was nine. Red Lobster was one of the first chain restaurants he visited in the United States, and it became a “staple” for his family.

In Springfield, he first ate at a Red Lobster with his parents and two siblings after church one Sunday. Red Lobster was where he, like millions of Americans, experienced eating lobster and cracking crab legs for the first time.

Adamolekun wanted to lead Red Lobster’s turnaround because of its history as the “first really successful casual dining chain in America at scale.” Bill Darden, a pioneer of the casual dining revolution in America, opened Red Lobster in 1968. The chain grew rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s under General Mills’ ownership.