Red Lobster - someone else's idea of Maine - declares bankruptcy

The Red Lobster logo is displayed on the door of a restaurant in Yonkers, New York, U.S., on Thursday, July 24, 2014.

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images

There are no Red Lobster restaurants in Maine, though there used to be. Several years ago, the Florida-based chain came to grips with the fact that it suburban locations could not compete in Maine with genuine lobster pounds for both scenery and freshness of taste. It closed down restaurants in Bangor and Auburn in 1998.

But it still sought to capitalize in other ways on Maine, which a Red Lobster spokesman once said was the company's "spiritual home." In 2007, the company sought to mimic the casual appeal of Bar Harbor's scenic downtown with new locations it was opening that year. It still offers a "Bar Harbor Lobster Bake" on its menu.

The company buys a lot of Maine lobster, of course, but has struggled to maintain its appeal. Last week, new broke that it ws closing dozens of locations natiowide. Yesterday, the company filed for bankruptcy so it can try to restructure its finances (read the AP story here).

In light of the company's financial straits, I've pasted below a BDN story from November 2007 (I can't find it elsewhere online) about the restaurant's efforts to make it customers feel like they were visiting Bar Harbor when they came through the doors:

A sense of place Red Lobster, one of state's largest crustacean customers, adopts 'Bar Harbor' design

The concept of using Maine imagery to attract visitors or customers is nothing new.

Tourism industry officials, Chambers of Commerce, resort owners and others long have disseminated images of the state's rocky coastline, its forested mountains, its abundant wildlife and its lobster boats to capture the interest of people with some disposable income. L.L. Bean Inc., the Freeport-based retailer, is known worldwide for its catalogs, which are filled with photos of attractive people hiking through rugged and scenic terrain while wearing the company's famous flannel shirts and boots.

Such marketing usually is done either to draw people to Maine or customers to a company that is based here. But there is one large national restaurant chain which has no customers or even employees in Maine that is giving credit for its new design to one of the state's most popular tourist destinations.

Red Lobster, which has more than 680 locations in North America, says Bar Harbor is the "inspiration" for the interior design it has chosen for all of its new restaurants, according to a press release recently issued by the company.

The Red Lobster restaurant nearest to Bar Harbor is more than 350 miles away in Wethersfield, Conn., the only New England state where the chain operates. Red Lobster used to have Maine outlets in Bangor and Auburn but closed them in 1998 without offering a public explanation for shutting them down.

Restaurants with the new design scheme have been opened in Inglewood, Calif., near Cleveland in North Olmsted, Ohio, and most recently in Sherman, Texas.

"We do consider Maine to be our spiritual home," said Wendy Spirduso, director of communications for the Orlando, Fla.-based company. "Bar Harbor is one of [Red Lobster President Kim Lopdrup's] favorite spots in Maine."

According to Spirduso, the new restaurant design does not employ any elements specific to Bar Harbor - diners will not see any re-creations of the local pier or of Cadillac Mountain - but it does try to capture the warm, casual atmosphere of life on the Maine coast without being kitschy.

Photos of the new Texas restaurant provided by Red Lobster show a bar, lobby and dining room with muted colors, finished surfaces in stone and dark wood, and brass details such as light fixtures and coat hooks. The only distinct, recognizable theme elements in the photos are a white, life-saving ring mounted on the wall of the bar and a model boat hull on display in the lobby.

Big buyer of Maine lobster

Red Lobster's parent company, Darden Restaurants Inc., also owns the Olive Garden, Smokey Bones, and Longhorn Steakhouse restaurant chains, among others. Red Lobster had $2.58 billion in sales for 2006, according to the company.

Despite its lack of a formal presence in Maine, Red Lobster does conduct business in the state. It is said to be one of the largest buyers of lobster from Maine, where nearly $300 million worth of the crustaceans were caught in 2006. With about 7,000 licensed lobstermen in a state with fewer than 1.5 million residents, the lobster industry is considered one of the top industries in Maine.

Dane Somers, executive director of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council, said that outside of processors and some supermarket retailers, Red Lobster may be the Maine lobster industry's biggest customer.

"That's probably safe to say, as far as restaurants go," he said. "They are a very large organization. We'd like to think their choice is always [to buy] Maine lobster, but that might not always be true."

Somers' assumption is correct, according to Spirduso. The company buys lobster from other parts of the world, she said, but buys at least 75 percent of its lobster from New England and Atlantic Canada. The bulk of that lobster, she said, comes from Maine.

Spirduso declined to say how much lobster Red Lobster serves at its restaurants, saying it considers such information proprietary. But she did say lobster is the second most popular item on the restaurant's menu, immediately behind shrimp.

As for crediting Bar Harbor for inspiring Red Lobster's new design scheme, Spirduso said Lopdrup has been to the town numerous times and was inspired by the setting and quality of food served at the local restaurants. Lopdrup's affinity for Mount Desert Island, she said, is one of the reasons the company sponsors the MDI Marathon.

Chris Fogg, executive director of the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce, said the concept of using Bar Harbor or Maine imagery as a marketing tool makes sense.

The town has a nationwide reputation for its scenery and authenticity, he said. The fact that it has fantastic views of the coast and at the same time a working waterfront where local fishermen come and go from their boats helps to draw millions of tourists to Mount Desert Island every year.

"In a lot of ways it's a quaint seaside town, not to mention the unbridled beauty of Acadia National Park," Fogg said. "I think it's interesting for people to go down to the pier and to see lobstermen going out for their daily run."

Red Lobster does not have restaurants in Maine because of competitive reasons, according to Spirduso. As the new restaurant design is implemented, she said, the company hopes it will be able to expand, which could mean reopening restaurants in the state down the road.

"We consider Maine to be the prime place for seafood," Spirduso said. "You are blessed with many, many restaurants up there that specialize in lobster."

Red Lobster does not even have any employees in Maine to serve as buyers for the company's seafood, she said, but that also could change, depending on the company's growth. Darden Restaurants has a training center for Olive Garden chefs in Tuscany, Italy, and has considered opening a similar Red Lobster training facility in Maine, she said.

"It is key to us," Spirduso said of Maine's role in supplying the chain with seafood. "It's also key in the inspiration it provides. Maine is important to us, absolutely."

Giving back to Maine

Gary Allen, the MDI Marathon's race director, said Red Lobster sponsors the race because it wants to "give back" to Maine. He said that by not having any restaurants in the state, Red Lobster has very little to gain financially by sponsoring the event.

"They contacted us [about becoming a race sponsor]," Allen said. "They feel a lot of the success of their business is due to Maine."

Allen said that in founding the race six years ago, he set out to create a high-profile, nationally known event, a goal that would be impossible without the backing of a big company such as Red Lobster.

In the past year, the company has used coasters that promote the MDI Marathon at all of its restaurants, Allen said. On average, Red Lobster serves more than 1 million beverages every week, he said.

"You can't buy that kind of advertising," Allen said. "There's no way we could afford them."

Somers said Red Lobster's use of Maine imagery does not simply boil down to a corporation co-opting the Maine "brand" for its own profit. Though Red Lobster does not employ anyone in the state, he said, its support of the lobster industry benefits Maine. And Red Lobster's customers may be inspired to visit Maine if they enjoy their dining experience, he said.

"I think it certainly does help," Somers said. "It promotes the whole lobster industry."

In Bar Harbor, the town manager viewed Red Lobster's public reference to the town much the same way.

Dana Reed said many local companies incorporate the words "Bar Harbor" into their business names but that the town is not likely to consider trademarking its name. An Ohio native, Reed said that before he moved to Maine 21 years ago to take his current job, he had heard about Bar Harbor and had always wanted to visit.

"The more times Bar Harbor gets mentioned out there, the better it is for our tourism business," Reed said. "Imitation is the best form of flattery."

Wooden piers, key to Maine's fishing and tourist economies on the coast, keep getting hammered by winter storms

 

Debris litters the deck of a large wooden pier in Southwest Harbor that was severely damaged in storms that caused coastal flooding in January.

The map below shows where wooden piers and floating docks have been damaged in multiple winter storms between December 2023 and March 2024. Most of the damage occurred during twin storms on Jan. 10 and Jan. 13. In all storms, high winds, heavy seas and unusually high tides worked together to flood low-lying waterfront infrastructure. The overall damage to Maine's coast, which includes shorefront roads and private homes (which are not specifically labeled on this map). The cost of the overall damage from the December and January storms is estimated to be $90 million.

Tito's vodka is now the dominant booze in Maine

Tito's Handmade Vodka, the Texas-based spirit that a dozen years ago no one in Maine had ever heard of, is on the verge of doing something big in our small state. 

After Allen's Coffee Favored Brandy dominated liquor sales in Maine for more than a decade, and then Kentucky-based Fireball Cinnamon Whisky held the top spot for two years, the vodka brand in 2023 led the way with more than $19 million in bottles sold. Allen's CFB best year was in 2009, when it had $12.9 million in sales. Fireball was the biggest seller in Maine in 2018 and 2019 but had its best year in 2020, when it sold $13.3 million worth of its cinnamon-flavored whisky here. 

Tito's has been the top seller in Maine for 4 years in a row now, and its numbers keep going up. In 2020 it totaled $13.4 millon, then topped $15.7 million the year after that and in 2022 rang up more than $17.7 million in sales. Over those four years, while it held the top spot each year, its sales in the state have increased a whopping 43 percent. At the rate it's going, Tito's seems certain to exceed $20 million in sales in Maine in 2024. 

What makes the steep climb more impressive is that liquor sales overall in Maine are not rising at the same rate, which is probably good for our collective health. Since 2019, the volume of cases of liquor sold in Maine has increased 10 percent, while the gross revenue generated from those sales has increased 24.5 percent. Even as the volume of booze sales increases in Maine, Tito's is getting a bigger market share.

Of course, Fireball sells more bottles than anyone else because of the ridiculous undying popularity of its nips -- the 50 milliliter bottles that make for quick hits and sells well at gas stations and convenience stores, and which frequently can be found discarded along Maine's roadsides. Fireball sold more than 1 million of those bottles in Maine last year, bringing in $2.2 million in sales.

But the unit the dominates sales value in Maine is Tito's "handle," the 1.75 liter bottle that has (as that same size does for other brands) a glass handle that makes it easier to carry. Tito's sold 450,000 handles last year for more than $10 million -- which is more than either Tito's or Allen's earned for all their bottles sizes in 2018, when Fireball displaced Allen's, and nearly as much as Fireball's all-sizes total that year. Allen's handle placed second last year with just under $4 million in sales.

So, yes, Tito's is currently the dominant brand of booze in Maine, but how long any brand might hold that spot seems less assured than it used to be in the 2000s and 2010s, when Allen's ruled the Maine bartender's well. Some other brand easily could come along in a few years, throw millions of dollars into a hip social media campaign, and get swept into the top spot.

Which, quite frankly, makes following Maine's annual liquor sales totals little less interesting. When Allen's was #1, part of what made it fun was that Allen's was relatively unheard outside of Maine, even in Massachusetts, where it is made. Travel a state or two outside New England, and many bartenders likely won't even know what a "coffee brandy" is. Ask, and you might well be served a mug of coffee and a snifter of Hennessy.

Whether or not Allen's is among the best (it's not bad, but not great either) is beside the point. It still is a favorite among many 40+ year-old drinkers who remember going out and having only a wall-mounted TV or other bar patrons to occupy their attention (i.e., before people stared at their phones). Allen's is trying to feed that Maine-centric nostalgia now by selling its product in Maine lighthouse-shaped bottles that it promotes as collector's items.

I don't see the nationwide brands bottling their products in Maine-specific containers anytime soon. Tito's may be the popular booze of the moment, but I'd be surprised if it still leads the charts in another few years. It may never happen again, but it would be fun if Maine once more defied national trends when another brand of booze rises to the top of the state's bottle heap.  

This is why I created the Maine Mansions Map

Shown above is an online, interactive map I first created in 2013 while researching mansions on Mount Desert Island, and have been curating ever since. Now that it has gotten more than 400,000 views (as of Jan. 2024) I figured it would be worth writing up an explanation of what sort of info I post with the map.

It is not intended to be a “lifestyles of the rich & famous” sort of thing, even though that is one inescapable aspect of it. Maine predominantly is a rural state with a low ratio of wealthy year-round residents but its scenery attracts many very wealthy people from out of state who, either simply by paying property taxes or by also employing local people and helping to fund local institutions, have a significant impact on the communities where they spend their precious vacation time. Mainers cherish their privacy and afford these seasonal residents a lot of it, which is fair and appropriate, but given the impact these mansion owners can have on these small towns, there is legitimate public interest in knowing, to an extent, who they are and what kind of backgrounds they have.

I’m also motivated by my enjoyment of maps and of zooming in and exploring places with Google’s satellite imagery. Some of the houses I find appealing, though I’m not much of an architecture buff. Some of them, on the other hand, are not that attractive. Others are notable for their size or location, and still others  have modern and daring designs that make them stand out among their neighbors or surrounding landscape. Some of the houses themselves have histories that are worth noting. Some of them are quite visible from public vantage points, and others are tucked away and difficult to get a first-hand glimpse of unless you saunter up the driveway (something I won’t do and don’t recommend) or, in many cases, have the use of a boat. 

Google’s satellite imagery, obviously, has made getting an aerial view of these mansions a lot easier than it used to be. What’s more, there are a lot of them, especially along the coast– too many, frankly, to tag and identify them all. There has to be criteria for which properties get listed, lest the map turn into heaping pile of overlapping colored stars and pop-up windows, many of which may contain very little worthwhile information. 

 Luckily, not all “mansions” are created equal, which is reflected in the color-coded scheme of stars I’ve employed to tag the properties: White stars = properties with estimated values of less than $1 million. Yellow stars = from $1 million up to $3 million. Orange stars = from $3 million up to $5 million Red stars = from $5 million up to $10 million. Purple stars = $10 million and above. 

Some of the mansions are big and expensive by anyone’s standard – Robert Greenhill’s mansion overlooking northern Moosehead Lake and Dick Wolf’s mansion in Seal Harbor on MDI come to mind. Others might stand out in their local communities but don’t come close to rivaling large, luxury homes elsewhere in the state. This is why I have tagged so few properties in Washington County, in far eastern coastal Maine, which is considered one of the state’s poorest counties even though it has some of its most beautiful coastal scenery. Simply put, there are very few (if any) big, luxury houses there - which I am sure many locals would say is a good thing). 

 Usually I can find the estimated value of a house by looking up municipal or state property tax assessments online or, if they are for sale, by finding the list price on real estate websites. Size I don’t really consider, though frequently there is close correlation between how big a house is and how much it is worth. But if I found a really small house worth, say, $2 million, I would probably tag it because it would be pretty unusual. 

 The extent of assessing information available online varies greatly from town to town, which is why details provided on the map can be inconsistent from one town to the next. Some towns provide only acreage and land and building values, while others also provide the year the house was built, square footage, the number of bedrooms and bathroom and even exterior photographs. All online assessing information includes the name of the owner, be it the name of a person or a private LLC. 

 Some towns don’t provide any assessing information online at all. Friendship, Sorrento and Islesboro are examples of towns that do not. All four of these coastal towns have expensive, seasonal waterfront homes, however, and in the case of Islesboro some of them clearly are qualified to be listed among the most exclusive summer estates in Maine. For Islesboro (which I hope to visit at some point so I can look though the town’s public paper assessing records), I’ve made rough guesses based on local real estate listings or by doing quick comparisons with other similar oceanfront homes elsewhere in the state. 

 I try not to tag houses with an estimated value less than $1 million, though I do make some exceptions. Private ocean islands have unusual appeal, so I might identify some that have houses, especially if the islands are for sale, even though they might be listed for less than $1 million. I also make exceptions for well-known Mainers such as former Gov. John McKernan, who co-owns a summer house at Hancock Point near Ellsworth, and for UFC founder Dana White, who graduated from high school in Hermon and owns a modest property in Levant. 

 I also take into consideration where in Maine the property is located. It seems every other shorefront home in Northeast Harbor and neighboring Seal Harbor on MDI is worth at least $2 million, so I try to list only the more expensive ones or those with interesting information about them or their owners that I can find online. This same higher standard applies to the high-end communities of Prouts Neck in Scarborough, Biddeford Pool, Camden and Rockport, and maybe one or two other coastal towns. 

Conversely, inland towns have much fewer mansions, so any big house away from the coast that is worth $1 million or more is much more likely to get tagged than a house of the same value on the coast. The exception to that rule would be Washington County, where I have yet to find any luxury oceanfront house worth more than $1 million. 

If the house (not just the land) seems valuable enough to tag on the map, I’ll try to find out who the owner is. Often it is easy – sometimes surprisingly so – but often it is not. In the case of properties with an LLC as the listed owner, it can take a lot of effort to try to track down other verifying information online, usually in the form of news reports, court filings, or business information. Sometimes those efforts come up empty. My strong preference is to find out the name of the person or persons who actually own the mansion and to find basic information about how they came by their wealth. 

If I can find these things, I’ll include links in the pop-up window for that property to news reports or web pages that have information about the owners. Sometimes I will tag a luxury home even if I cannot find out or verify who the owners are, but the house itself has to be striking or interesting enough on its own merits without having to know to whom it belongs. In these cases, I make sure to provide links to information about the actual house, such as real estate listings, photos and descriptions on architect websites, or articles from architecture or home and lifestyle-focused publications. One such example of this is modern house in Camden owned by Toriko LLC which features a highly unusual design in which two parts of the house are connected by a long indoor, single-lane-width swimming pool. Evergreen Estate in Greenville, which comes with a surrounding private 9-hole golf course, is another.

One last thing: I want to stress that all the information posted about properties identified on the map is readily and legally available to the public, either from the government entities that assess property taxes or from media reports, public real estate listings, court documents, and the like. I have found some things online about people or properties that I do not fully trust to be accurate or appropriate and which, as a result, I woin't link to, on the map or anywhere else. All of the information posted with the map, including links, is provided with the intent of being objective, fair and impartial.