Review: Red Lobster Crabfest 2024 Won't Reel In New Fans

I love a good festival — brew fest, craft fest, garden fest — and perhaps the most chain restaurant recognizable of all: Red Lobster's Crabfest. Rather than including vendors, attractions, and a generally revelrous breakout, this event, if you can call it that, is actually the rollout of some new, specialty menu items at Red Lobster. 

Though the seafood chain has recently been in the news for filing for bankruptcy, inexplicably, Crabfest has returned this year. (Though not without a little help from Flavor Flav, who ordered the entire menu at once in an effort to save the sinking ship.) One thing is for sure — the restaurant isn't pulling up anchor just yet. The reintroduction of Crabfest brings  several new dishes to Red Lobster diners nationwide.

As a cheddar bay biscuit aficionado, I was eager to see what Crabfest was like at Red Lobster. I wondered what the environment would be, how the food would taste, and if it was worth it to give Red Lobster a visit as it moves through bankruptcy.

This review is based on firsthand impressions of promotional materials and products provided by Red Lobster.

After a four year break in the tide, Crabfest once again washed ashore at Red Lobster locations in 2023. With the financial drama of the brand actively unfolding, it would be reasonable to assume Crabfest was caught in a fishing net somewhere, never to return. However, it's here once again for a limited time. I wish I could offer you anything more specific than that, but the brand seems utterly tight lipped about releasing any kind of indication of when Crabfest is going to end.

For this limited time, you can order off a specialty menu of entrees featuring — let me check my notes — crab. Some dishes more heavily feature it than others, and it comes in a few different forms. The Crabfest menu has five to six dishes, depending on where you're dining. There's a pound of crab legs, a crab-lobster duo plate, snow crab legs with sirloin or filet steak, a crab mac and cheese, and a lump crab carbonara. To get an accurate picture of what you can eat at Crabfest, I sampled some options, looking for what would get me the most bang for my buck.

Pasta calls to me as the sea calls to Moana, but truly, if there's ever a pasta that is better left on the menu, it may be this one. Trust me when I say that it looked promising. Both the picture and the description reeled me right in. One bite, though, and I was off the hook.

The Creamy Crab Carbonara is a thin linguini with an ambiguous cream sauce, crab, bacon, and tomatoes. The bacon added an smokiness that didn't pair well with the crab, but the seafood wasn't flavorful enough to make much of an impact. The tomatoes were diced and tasteless, either missing the sugars of their ripened stage or having never hung around to have one. 

Of all of the dishes I tried, this was the least favored and the one that looked barely picked over when my waiter came back to clean it up. At $20, it felt like a pretty good deal, but there were better options on the menu, to be sure.

Of course, I needed to try some of that classic surf and turf. This $33.99 dish was a combination of snow crab legs and sirloin that had a crab topping of some kind. It also comes with a side dish of your choice, but I'll keep this to the Crabfest items in question.

I struggled to decipher exactly what it was; it definitely looked different in person than it did on the ads — queue gasps — but it seemed to be a crab compound butter of some kind. That was my best guess, at least, because it certainly wasn't the flakey crab meat I saw in the menu photo. The plate came topped with a dusting of parsley over everything, including the shells of the crab legs, which I found endlessly silly.

The steak was cooked according to the medium side of my medium-rare request. The legs were pretty tasty, with a fair bit of meat. Honestly, this dish was fine. There wasn't anything extraordinary about it, but it checked the box. With a side item, it did what it was intended to do, but don't expect this to be the greatest crab or sirloin you've ever had.

As a big fan of lobster, I was looking forward to this one. For $37.99, you get crab, lobster, and a side. The tail I was served was on the medium side in terms of size; I've definitely had larger ones at restaurants, but I've been served smaller ones, too. 

Lobster can be tough to get right texturally. I'm not the only one who has had lobster that were over- or undercooked. I can happily say that this one was quite nice, a relief for a restaurant chain that takes its namesake from the seafood. Not too tender, not gummy, but nice and moist. Always a fan of butter, I love it when lobster and crab come with a warm cup, so that was also a nice perk with this platter.

Although the seafood did not disappoint, I couldn't help feeling like this dish should have done something a little more interesting. It was just so basic. Maybe that's what most people want when they visit Red Lobster, but for a struggling restaurant chain, I'd love to see the Crabfest come out with something that draws people in. Basic, fine dishes just aren't going to do it.

Okay, Red Lobster, we need a chat. You have Crab Mac & Cheese on your menu for $7.99 or as a side upcharge for $5.49, but it's a tiny, side offering. It's so very small. Make this in an entree size, not this little pea brain size. This was easily the best bite of the night.

Unfortunately, it wasn't the crab here that was exciting; rather, it was the macaroni and cheese with those little onion bits on top. The cheese was on point and the cavatappi noodles were a perfect choice, but the crab? To me, it honestly looked like canned crab meat rather than the good stuff right from the claw. It was also just sitting on top. There was no mixing happening here; it was a garnish. Crab should not be the garnish of a fest with its name featured. Any amount of mixing and baking it in, topped with a breadcrumb and broiled with cheese on top for a minute would have improved the crab's station.

Honestly, and this pains me, but no. I wouldn't rush your family out for Crabfest. The dishes are fine, but if you live anywhere near a coast or visit one on vacation, save your buck for a place that's going to take the seafood and make it into something special and memorable. My food was fine, but it just wasn't worth going out of the way for.

When I was in the restaurant, the staff were very attentive and friendly, but there was also next to no one visiting. The environment felt like a restaurant that was getting ready to close down even though I visited at a peak dinner time. When I was a kid, Red Lobster was the place to go. You had to wait quite a long time for a table. Now, the business just feels like it's drying up. Customers have set their sights on distant shores of restaurants that are interested in reeling people in and making the experience unique, delicious, and memorable.