The Reason Red Lobster Always Delivers an Extra Biscuit to Your Table

It's called Red Lobster, but the seafood chain may be most famous for its cheddar bay biscuits. The cheesy, fresh-baked rolls are so popular that the restaurant started selling its biscuit mix in stores. If you prefer to eat the appetizer in a restaurant setting, you may have noticed a quirk of how Red Lobster prepares its baskets. Servers always seem to bring just enough biscuits so that it's impossible for diners to distribute them evenly amongst their party. If this happens to you every time you visit Red Lobster, you're not unlucky—the extra biscuit rule is an official policy enforced by the chain, as Delish reports.

A Red Lobster employee dished their company's secrets in a Reddit AMA in 2016. When asked why their baskets always seem to contain an odd number of biscuits for an even number of people, the server had this to say: "We bring one biscuit for every person at the table, plus an additional biscuit for the table. Corporate policy."

The answer confirms that the extra biscuit phenomenon isn't in the customers' heads, but it doesn't explain why it became corporate policy in the first place. A comment on the same thread may offer some clarification. The commenter claims to work at Olive Garden, which is owned by the company that used to operate Red Lobster. They say that Olive Garden follows the same rule with its bread sticks, and the extra piece in the first basket is meant to be a "conversation starter" for the table. Whether those conversations about who gets the last piece are friendly or explosive likely depends on how hungry the diners are.

If you don't want your biscuit portions to be subject to the whims of Red Lobster, you can always try making your own at home. In addition to Red Lobster's official mix, there are plenty of copycat recipes online that purport to be as good as the real thing. And if you're hosting a dinner party, you can head off any drama by making an equal number of biscuits for each guest. Here are more facts about Red Lobster to feast your eyes on.

[h/t Delish]