There’s more bad news at Red Lobster.
Liquidator TAGeX Brands said that as of Tuesday more than four dozen of the seafood restaurants are closed and that it will be selling off their contents to highest bidder.
“On our Restaurant Equipment marketplace, we are auctioning off 50+ locations across the country,” TAGeX said. The auctions will run through May 16. The winners of each auction will get everything inside a given location.
Red Lobster did not immediately reply to a request for comment to confirm whether the locations were closed, but visits to select web pages for restaurants in cities on the list of running auctions seems to confirm this. TAGeX says it is clearing out a Red Lobster in Myrtle Beach, for example. The Red Lobster website has two entries for that city.; one of them displays normal operating hours, while the other says “CLOSED” for each business day.
Reports have swirled that the seafood chain may soon be filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to deal with labor costs and underperformance. In March, Restaurant Dive reported that the company named Jonathan Tibus as CEO, the third person in the role in as many years. He replaced Horace Dawson, who had been CEO for six months after working at the company for 21 years.
Nation’s Restaurant News reports that Tibus is a restructuring expert who had previously served as CEO of Kona Grill during its 2019 bankruptcy and chief restructuring officer at burger chain Krystal’s when it went through bankruptcy in 2020.
Thai Union Group, the Thailand-based company that bought a 25% stake in Red Lobster in 2016 and doubled it in 2020, announced last week in a financial filing that it will be seeking to exit the business by the end of the year.