Surprising ingredients in your lobster dish
 
 
 
(Note: This used to be called, rightly, False Advertising. If someone dies of a food allergic reaction due to this "practice," there should be a strong legal leg to stand on, because Red Lobster is not going to change without a tussle.)
 
 
September 27, 2004
 
 
A CBS 2 Special Report
 
 
To submit a Letter to the Editor: http://cbsnewyork.com/feedback/
 
 
When you go out to a restaurant you expect that what you read on the menu is what you get. But as CBS 2's Kirstin Cole reports, that may not always be the case when ordering certain seafood dishes at one major chain.

Red Lobster is the most popular seafood chain in America.

With 680 restaurants, netting over $2 billion last year, they're known mainly for just one thing: lobster.

And it brings customers like Anita Bolan and her family back to Red Lobster again and again. "I always get the lobster or the shrimp."

But Anita is careful to read the menu and always ask her wait staff if the lobster dishes contain any other seafood, because she says she's highly allergic to crawfish. "I break out into these terrible hives, really red, huge all over my face."

While not common, Dr. Scott Sicherer of Mt. Sinai School Of Medicine Researcher says it does happen. He recently studied the prevalence of seafood allergies in the U.S.

"It's possible to have a seafood allergy where you are allergic to one shellfish and not the other," Dr. Sicherer explains.

Like Anita, who couldn't understand why she got sick after eating one of Red Lobster's popular "lobster and shrimp" pastas, there was no mention of crawfish on the menu.

"I thought it was contaminated with crawfish, accidentally contaminated," Bolan recalls.

But when she suffered another allergic reaction, after being assured by the waitress at a different location that her lobster and shrimp nachos contained no crawfish, Anita called the manager.

To her surprise, he told her there was more than just lobster in the dish -- in fact, it was also made with the little red-lobster lookalike, crawfish.

"I was upset, I never heard of that before," Bolan says.

So why isn't crawfish listed on the menu?
 
We went undercover to four different Red Lobster locations in New York and New Jersey -- not the ones Anita went to -- to find out if staffers knew about it.
 
At two locations, wait staff told us, yes, indeed, certain lobster dishes also have crawfish.

"I believe there is crawfish in there," a waitress told our undercover team in Wayne.

But at two other locations we were assured no crawfish, "just shrimp and lobster."

At a Paramus [New Jersey] Red Lobster it was complete confusion. "It's a product of China; I don't know about it," a manager said.

So what's in these lobster dishes? Since there are no lab tests that identify crawfish, we went to Red Lobster corporate headquarters in Orlando, Florida, for some answers.

"What we do is add crawfish to the seafood combination plates because they add flavor, they add texture -- so in our minds, we're adding value to those dishes," says Ken Mills, Vice President of Marketing.

Top management at Red Lobster assured us they're not substituting one shellfish for another, just adding crawfish to meals like the lobster & shrimp nachos, the artichoke lobster dip, the lobster & crab stuffed mushrooms and these lobster & shrimp pasta dishes. All have crawfish mixed in -- but they don't tell you that on the menu.

"Ridiculous," says Michael Jacobsen, executive director of the nutrition advocacy group, Center For Science In The Public Interest.

He thinks this is deceptive. "If it says lobster on the menu that's what you should be getting, it shouldn't be replaced or supplemented with crawfish or anything else unless the menu is very clear about that."

At a fraction of the cost of lobster, Jacobsen believes it's the crawfish's reputation as "the poor man's lobster" that keeps it off the menu.
 
"How many people who are out for a lobster dinner want crawfish? They are trying to maximize the consumer’s perception of the value of the meal."

But Red Lobster denies this, explaining crawfish is not on the menu because it's not the primary ingredient and they can't always get it.

"We couldn't be assured of availability and so we didn't want to list on the menu a product that wasn't available and so, ironically, it was our effort not to misinform guests that led us to take the listing off the menu," says Mills.

So just how much crawfish are you getting in these lobster combination dishes?

Red Lobster wouldn't tell us, explaining it's part of a secret recipe. "We take this very seriously and we've got to improve how we communicate with guests about what ingredients are in that food."

Red Lobster says they spoke repeatedly to Anita and stressed she was the only one to complain about a crawfish allergy in 2 1/2 years.

But they will be retraining all of their general managers in food allergy safety and say quality assurance people have been put into place to answer customer questions but they wouldn't commit to putting crawfish on their menus, a fact that disappoints Anita.

"They have a reputation to maintain, they have some obligation to their customers," she says.

In our interview with Red Lobster management, they assured us that crawfish was the only fish in their seafood combos not printed on the menu.
 
But later they e-mailed us, admitting there is even more fish added to these five dishes -- cod and pollock are also not listed on the menu.
 
Copyright 2004, CBS Broadcasting