What You Need To Know Before You Eat Lobster This Valentine's Day
Lobster, like champagne and filet mignon, is a luxurious option often saved solely for special occasions like anniversaries, birthdays, or romantic Valentine's Day dinners. And that's understandable—it's expensive! But a new report is claiming that restaurants aren't serving you the top-notch shellfish you're shelling out big bucks for. No, instead they're serving a cheap seafood alternative.
According to "Inside Edition," your lobster roll, soup, ravioli, and even pizza could be totally fake. After visiting 28 restaurants around the country—including chains like Nathan's and Red Lobster—investigators found that 35 percent of the dishes they ordered contained cheap lobster imitations (via DNA testing) instead of the real deal. So which restaurants are fooling us with their fake lobster recipes?
In some cases, inexpensive fish is mixed in with lobster to fill it out: lobster rolls at Get Hooked in Tampa, FL are made from a frozen seafood mixture that contains mostly whiting and pollock, two cheap and readily available white fish. Another dish at Red Lobster that's passed off as "lobster bisque" contains only langoustine, an inexpensive crustacean more similar to a prawn or crab.
The seafood chain responded to "Inside Edition" with the following statement: "Red Lobster, the world's largest seafood restaurant chain, serves a variety of lobster on its menu, including North American lobster, Maine lobster and langostino lobster."
Meanwhile the FDA says that soup made with only langostine cannot be called lobster bisque. But Red Lobster continued to push back, saying, "Inside Edition's test was a matter of what we call 'the luck of the ladle' and both types of lobster provide the bisque with a rich, sweet taste that our guests love."
But it gets even worse: At one spot, Sofia's in Manhattan's Little Italy, the "lobster" ravioli didn't contain any seafood at all—just cheese. Of course lobster isn't the only food to suffer from fraud. Olive oil has been the victim of hard-to-spot imitators for years.
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