For food critics, it’s common convention to never post your face on social media, lest you be recognized at a restaurant you’re tasked with reviewing and get preferential treatment. With the same surreptitious style, incoming Red Lobster CEO Damola Adamolekun frequented locations of the seafood chain months before he took the helm, assessing its food and how to improve the company.
In May, Adamolekun began visiting Red Lobsters around the U.S., snacking on crab legs, Maine lobster tail, and its famed Cheddar Bay biscuits, the Wall Street Journal reported. But Adamolekun’s status as the restaurant’s future CEO was unbeknownst to Red Lobster fellow dinners. Adamolekun, for the most part, enjoyed the food. He spoke with employees and regular customers to better understand if it was worth taking a dive to lead a seafood joint with a washed-up reputation.
Restaurant-goers “just want quality food in a comfortable setting and to connect with the history of the brand,” he told WSJ. “That’s the first step.”
That step will be more of a leap. Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy in May, shuttering dozens of North American restaurant locations and auctioning off equipment from more than 50 spots. The chain blamed its struggles on an unsustainable $20 all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion that wound up contributing to $11 million in losses, the toils of inflation, sluggish traffic, and quarrels with a former owner Thai Union. Powerhouse private equity firm Fortress Investment Group tapped him as Red Lobster’s CEO in August. The $49 billion investment management company will take over as Red Lobster’s parent as it emerges from bankruptcy.
The 56-year-old restaurant chain will put its trust in the 35-year-old CEO, who defined his early career by being a small fish in a big pond. Growing up in Nigeria, Zimbabwe and the Netherlands before moving to the U.S. at age nine, Adamolekun was a high school speech and debate champ and college investment nerd. Three years after graduating from Harvard Business School in 2017, he became CEO of pan-Asian restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s. He left the position in 2023 and joined private equity firm Garnett Station Partners this year.
Undercover boss
Adamolekun has prided himself on an unconventional approach that blurs the boundaries of leisure and work—or a sit-down seafood meal and a reconnaissance mission.
“My life is my work. My work is my life,” he told Fortune in 2023. Adamolekun often begins his days at 4:30 a.m. with a seven-to-eight-mile run and punctuates them with a cigar.
But the sleuthing restaurant visits prior to Adamolekun’s tenure as Red Lobster CEO is a budding practice for a company’s top brass, meant to instill empathy and hone intuition about on-the-ground business decisions. Not just the premise of a cable television show, becoming an undercover boss has prepared CEOs to face the sometimes unseen or underappreciated aspects of the rank-and-file employees whose labor fuels the economic success of a business.
Former Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol began his 2018 initiation as head of the company at a facility in Denver. Though he never worked at a Chipotle restaurant, he learned to manage a location’s busy lunch rush, chop up vegetables, prepare sides, and tightly wrap burritos, many of which he tore.
“Wrapping a burrito is an art,” Niccol told Fortune earlier this year.
At Starbucks, Niccol will replace Laxman Narasimhan, who, at the beginning of his CEO tenure in March 2023, vowed to employees he would spend hours working behind the counter of the Seattle coffee chain, donning an apron and slinging frappuccinos.
“To keep us close to the culture and our customers, as well as to our challenges and opportunities, I intend to continue working in stores for a half day each month, and I expect each member of the leadership team to also ensure our support centers stay connected and engaged in the realities of our stores for discussion and improvement,” he wrote in an email to employees.
Alexandre Ricard took a boozy bar crawl after he became CEO and chairman of the Paris-based liqueur giant Pernod Ricard, founded by his grandfather. Ricard frequented 40 to 50 bars to understand post-pandemic drinking culture and the impact of inflation of the industry. More on-the-ground market research than guy’s night out, Ricard’s tour allowed him to clearly understand how cocktails were being consumed, including which spirits had become popular among staff and patrons.
“At the same time, bartenders kept recommending a new gin,” he told the Seattle Times. “That was Monkey 47, which became my first acquisition as global chairman and CEO of the company.”
