Sydney Lake
4 min read
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Red Lobster CEO Damola Adamolekun came from a private equity and finance background, breaking into the restaurant industry through a successful deal he navigated. The former P.F. Chang’s CEO outlined the changes he’s enacting to save the beleaguered seafood chain from bankruptcy and to make it the beloved brand it once was.
Damola Adamolekun reached the pinnacle of restaurant leadership in a somewhat unconditional way. Although the Red Lobster CEO waited tables back in high school, his first big career move was landing an internship with global investment bank Goldman Sachs at age 19.
At the time, Adamolekun was a student athlete at Brown University, where he studied economics and political science. He continued to work as an analyst with Goldman Sachs following graduation for a couple of years, then moved on to become a private equity associate with TPG Capital, where he worked until 2015.
But Adamolekun’s big break came while he was a partner at hedge fund Paulson & Co., which now operates as a family office. In 2019, Paulson purchased Asian-inspired restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s in a $700 million deal. Adamolekun said during a podcast episode of The Breakfast Club that he was the one who pitched the idea to buy P.F. Chang’s to the firm.
“I thought we could do a lot of new things with it. We could add delivery, we could remodel the restaurants. We could make it more interesting,” Adamolekun said. The deal was successful—until the pandemic hit, wiping out restaurant and retail businesses. The P.F. Chang’s CEO even stepped down during COVID, and Adamolekun had to “rescue the situation,” he said.
And with that, Adamolekun stepped in as CEO, officially charting his path to become a revered restaurant executive. The P.F. Chang’s deal “ended up being a really good deal, but not without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears for a few years,” Adamolekun said. He masterminded a plan to remodel the chain’s restaurants and revamp the menu—and is largely using the same playbook as CEO of Red Lobster.
Adamolekun, 36, took over as CEO of Red Lobster in September, as the seafood chain was crawling from the ashes of bankruptcy. He has a three-pillar roadmap for reviving Red Lobster, particularly in the aftermath of its endless-shrimp debacle.
One of the biggest mistakes Red Lobster made was its endless-shrimp promotion. Because guests took advantage of the bonkers deal by consuming pound after pound of shrimp, the seafood chain ended up losing millions of dollars.
So, needless to say, Adamolekun is steering clear of any future bottomless-shrimp promotions in the future. Instead, he’s focused on revamping the seafood chain’s menu.
