A Red Lobster location in Palm Desert, California, roughly two hours east of Los Angeles, is shutting its doors in early September after a 14-year run, the latest closure in a chain still struggling to right itself after bankruptcy.
Employees at the Palm Desert restaurant learned the news Monday morning. One worker told local station KESQ the announcement blindsided the staff.
"We kind of found out this morning that our restaurant is closing, and as of September 6 or 7, we would no longer be open, and it was just news to all of us today."
The location opened in 2012. By early September it will be gone, and customers in the Coachella Valley area will have to drive to San Bernardino or Temecula for the nearest Red Lobster.
A Red Lobster spokesperson offered the kind of boilerplate companies issue when a closing is already decided. The chain "continuously evaluates restaurant performance and lease terms and may, from time to time, choose to close or relocate select restaurants," the spokesperson said.
Red Lobster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2024 after claiming $76 million in losses the prior year. During the bankruptcy process, the chain closed roughly 130 stores across the country.
CEO Damola Ademolekun has acknowledged the scale of the problem. In a February interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said the chain needed to close even more locations to cut costs.
"There's a lot of positive signs, but we inherited a very damaged brand, so there's still work to do to repair all of that."
That candor sits awkwardly next to the CEO's more optimistic public posture. At a company-wide town hall in June, Ademolekun told employees Red Lobster was planning "the greatest comeback in the history of the restaurant industry." He also told Vanity Fair the company projected net positive income by the end of its fiscal year.
Projecting profitability while simultaneously closing locations that employees didn't know were on the chopping block is a familiar corporate pattern: leadership talks turnaround while workers absorb the consequences with little warning. The Palm Desert staff found out Monday morning. By September, their jobs are gone.
Palm Desert is not the only casualty of the chain's ongoing contraction. In May, Red Lobster closed its oldest continuously operating location after 56 years of service. A spokesperson called that restaurant "a special place in Red Lobster's history" and thanked the guests and employees who supported it.
The words were warm. The outcome was the same: doors locked, staff displaced, and a community left without a restaurant it had relied on for decades.
Red Lobster's post-bankruptcy recovery road has been defined by this tension between optimistic corporate messaging and a shrinking footprint. Ademolekun has framed the closures as necessary surgery. But for the workers and regulars at each individual location, the surgery lands as a sudden loss.
Meanwhile, the chain is banking on a familiar play. Earlier this month, Red Lobster announced the return of its Endless Shrimp promotion, the same deal that Ademolekun himself previously blamed, in part, for the company's financial collapse.
The company's reasoning: customers "never stopped asking for it." In a statement, Red Lobster said fans "continued telling us they missed it, showed up when we brought it back this spring and kept asking for more after that run ended."
The chain framed the relaunch as a lesson learned rather than a repeat mistake. Red Lobster said it would not "walk away from something they love simply because the previous operating model did not work. The better answer was to fix what didn't work and bring it back in a way that is right for our guests, our restaurant teams and the company."
That is a reasonable-sounding statement from a company that lost $76 million in a single year and filed for bankruptcy protection shortly afterward. Whether the "fix" actually works is an open question. The original Endless Shrimp deal helped push the chain into bankruptcy, and creditors have accused former stakeholder Thai Union of exploiting the promotion to extract profits before the company cratered.
Bringing back the promotion that contributed to your financial ruin while simultaneously closing locations and blindsiding employees is a bold strategy. Red Lobster's leadership says the math is different this time. The workers in Palm Desert who just lost their jobs have no reason to take that on faith.
The number of employees affected by the Palm Desert closure has not been disclosed. Red Lobster has not said whether workers will be offered transfers to the San Bernardino or Temecula locations, or whether they are simply out of a job come September.
That silence is its own answer. When a company is offering generous relocation packages, it says so. When it is not, it issues statements about "continuously evaluating restaurant performance and lease terms."
Corporate turnarounds always have winners and losers. The winners get town halls, Vanity Fair interviews, and the chance to declare the greatest comeback in restaurant history. The losers get a Monday morning announcement and two weeks' notice.