In 2011, Darden Restaurants, which owned Olive Garden and, at the time, Red Lobster, realized that it needed a better way to boost revenue from both restaurants. To achieve this goal, six locations would be built as combination Olive Garden and Red Lobsters, designed to pull more profit using one single restaurant.
Combination restaurants aren’t new, even if the combination of Olive Garden and Red Lobster was unconventional. You may have, for example, seen a Taco Bell and a Pizza Hut sharing the same building or perhaps a KFC sharing space with a Long John Silver’s. There are many reasons why these combination restaurants exist, to be sure, but one is that the use of a single kitchen and building for two restaurants is a great way to save on resources. It’s much cheaper to build one building and use it to house both restaurants than to build two entirely separate structures. Combination restaurants could also appeal to areas that have a low population as, no matter what restaurant the customer chooses, the company would still be making a decent profit.
But it seems that such an achievement wasn’t in the cards for Darden Restaurants. Although six combination Olive Gardens/Red Lobsters were opened in total, they shuttered in 2014 and now remain a faint memory of what could have been. But how could the combination of two popular restaurants somehow fail?
