26 months ago, we received a $25 gift card for Red Lobster from JAF. A fine gift it was… but we never used it. Years passed and it had become almost a joke (“Hey, let’s go to Lobster for lunch…?”), since my irrational fear of table service restaurants would prevent us from ever going.
And then, today for lunch, we went!
Ignoring the trash on the patio, we stepped inside to the immediate and depressing site of a tank full of Lobsters waiting to be cooked. Shaming myself for my hypocrisy, we sat in a dark booth with an irritatingly flickering light until – after I’d flagged someone down since we’d seemingly been forgotten – we were moved to a better seat by the window.
With our drinks came cheese biscuits:
As with most foods I’ve never tasted, I assumed I’d hate them. So I was surprised to realize the opposite, and ate two very quickly. Before I could swallow my third – and I was about to! – the extreme saltiness of these things kicked in, which led to me grumbling about drink-selling conspiracies as I tanked my (free refill) diet cokes 🙂
Here were our main dishes. KLS had shrimp tacos:
And I had a fish sandwich:
Now the last fish sandwich I ate, two years ago in Australia with Sue, was frozen in the middle! So this one had to be better surely?
And it was. Not exceptional, but also not bad for the low price of $7.50. I may have made a comment or two (or ten) about it also being salty and tasting like ‘seawater’ but I certainly put it away no problem.
KLS describes her shrimp tacos as “quite good”. In fact, given she has never had shrimp tacos before, she says “they are far and away the best shrimp tacos” she’s ever had. A steal, at $8!
Now the menu at Lobster is enormous, and there is no doubt in my mind that there are many things on there we would have enjoyed much more than what we got. We had set ourselves a goal however, which was to use our gift card and only our gift card!
So how did we do?
Not bad eh? Shameful tightwad that I am, I was prepared to leave only a $2.76 tip and make a clean getaway, but KLS threw an additional dollar on the pile.
So our lunch only cost us $1. And by that definition, it was pretty good 🙂
