I've been spoiled by great seafood, and I miss it.
You know what I miss from Seattle? Good seafood. The lack of a decent seafood restaurant is a glaring omission from Waco's culinary landscape.
Red Lobster simply isn't it. I suppose it'll do in a pinch, much like Taco Bell used to do for my Tex-Mex cravings in Seattle. But let's be honest, Red Lobster is pretty much the Taco Bell of the seafood world. It may not be fast food, but a lot of the items on the menu taste like they're pre-prepared. Sure, the lobster might be living in a tank in the dining room until you order it and it's boiled to death, but anything less than that doesn't always taste all that fresh.
While Red Lobster's menu has a lot of options, they're not exactly what I'd want from a sit-down seafood restaurant. Langostino lobster might pass at Long John Silver's, but on the menu of a restaurant trying to be a tad nicer? Nope. The lack of any kind of crab upmarket from snow crab is pretty bad, too. At least offer King or Dungeness if you're going to be serious about this whole "seafood" thing.
There's a whole lot of fried things to order, but everywhere else in the Waco-verse already serves those sorts of dishes. When I sit down at a seafood restaurant, I usually want seafood that's broiled, grilled, steamed--ANYTHING but fried! The items on little fresh fish/daily special menu tends to be pretty good, but then I'm still frustrated by the lack of variety in the fish department. More things like this, please?
Every time I sit down to the menu at Red Lobster, I'm absolutely baffled as to why they didn't choose the name "Pink Shrimp" instead. The menu is thoroughly dominated by shrimp dishes. Again, shrimp isn't hard to find on the menus of many, many other restaurants in Waco. Why does Red Lobster exist, again?
Don't get me wrong--Red Lobster isn't all bad. I like being able to order tiny shrimp on top of my side salads and I must admit that the cheddar garlic biscuits are tasty. Really, really tasty. "I'd like to steal the bucket of biscuit batter" kind of tasty. This being said, the knock-off versions of these biscuits from the Czech Stop are just as fabulous, thus negating any reason I ever had for eating at Red Lobster.
To add insult to...fried shrimp, the service at Waco's Red Lobster tends to be a tad slow.
I'd tell you to eat somewhere else if you love seafood, but the sad thing is, I'm not sure where I'd send you in Waco.
