Red Lobster’s Last Gasp

On one of his first days as chief executive officer of Red Lobster, Damola Adamolekun made a bold prediction. The restaurant chain had just emerged from bankruptcy and was bleeding customers and cash. Uncertainty awaited its roughly 30,000 employees, many of whom had gathered for a town hall in late summer 2024 to meet Adamolekun, their sixth CEO in three years. “We’re going to execute the greatest comeback in the history of the restaurant industry,” he told the crowd.

Adamolekun was an unlikely pick to turn around this faded national icon. He was a 35-year-old Nigerian-born MBA who’d worked mostly in finance, with a brief stint leading P.F. Chang’s. A Black rising star with Wall Street chops, Adamolekun embarked on a publicity marathon to sell his story. He landed on the pages of the business press and appeared on network morning TV shows. He hobnobbed with lifestyle influencers at Red Lobster’s flagship restaurant in New York’s Times Square. And he gave podcast interviews on everything from his daily 4 a.m. runs to his ideas for ginning up a menu item to appeal to NFL stars Travis and Jason Kelce. Clad in fitted suits and stockpiled with charisma and confidence, Adamolekun cultivated the impression that he was just the man to restore Red Lobster to glory. “There’s very little evidence,” he told Charlamagne tha God on his Breakfast Club radio show last year, “of me not excelling at anything that I’ve tried to do.”