The Red Lobster on North Monroe Street in Tallahassee will close Sunday, May 24, ending a 56-year run that made it the chain’s oldest continuously operating location. Store manager and employees confirmed the red lobster tallahassee closure to the Tallahassee Democrat on May 18.
The restaurant opened in October 1970 and became a familiar fixture for generations of diners, with longtime kitchen worker Horace Williams describing the pace as steady and relentless. “I have cooked over a hundred meals a day, sometimes 150,” he said. “It all depends on how many people come in that door.”
The shutdown lands at a moment when Red Lobster is still trying to steady itself after a year of upheaval. The company exited bankruptcy in September 2024 with a new operational plan and a $60 million investment from Fortress Investment Group, and it had about 545 remaining locations at that point. Later that year, 126 locations closed nationwide, including 17 storefronts in Florida, as the chain shrank its footprint and reworked its future.
The Tallahassee restaurant was not part of that first wave of closures. In fact, it had been treated as something of a survivor, even hosting a grand re-opening with new menus focused on wild caught seafood flavors and support from corporate staff. That made the decision to close it now more striking, because the North Monroe Street location had been described as a place the company was keeping open while it sorted out the rest of the system.
Red Lobster has also been cutting deeper this year. The company reduced its workforce by about 1% in December 2025, a move that eliminated less than 200 restaurant-level employees, according to Restaurant Business. The chain has also laid off about 10% of its corporate staff in recent months, according to The. Around the time of those cuts, the company had roughly 480 locations left.
CEO Damola Adamolekun told The earlier this year that Red Lobster was assessing its roster of restaurants and their leases, with more closures possible. That review now reaches one of the chain’s most visible legacy stores in Florida, a restaurant that opened when the brand was still building its national identity and that outlasted most of the locations around it.
Red Lobster, once known for its endless shrimp promotion, has been living with financial trouble for years. The closure of its oldest continuously operating Tallahassee restaurant shows that the company’s reset is still not finished, and that even the locations with the longest history can be pulled into the next round of cuts.
