'One in 30 million': Extremely rare orange lobster found in Pueblo restaurant

In 12 years of working at Pueblo’s Red Lobster, Jose Romero has unloaded too many shipments of lobster to count.

The longtime dishwasher is always the man in charge of unpacking the lobsters, but in performing his regular duty on July 12, he came across something he — and most other people — had never seen before: an incredibly rare and vibrantly colored orange lobster.

“The first thought that went through his head was that he’s seen a blue lobster before, which was different, but he’s never seen an orange one,” Romero recalled for the Chieftain through a translator. “When he saw it he just immediately was like … ‘Let me go get my leadership.’”

Kendra Kastendieck, the restaurant’s general manager, has only overseen the Pueblo seafood eatery for about a year but has worked in restaurants for about two decades. In all of her years, she said she’d never come across an orange lobster and her director, who’s worked for Red Lobster for 10 years, had never seen one either.

“Everybody knows the blue lobsters because they make such headlines and they’re so brilliant in color, but those are only one in 2 million, the orange ones are one in 30 million. So we thought that was extra cool when it came into the restaurant,” Kastendieck said.

“Obviously, we didn’t want to sell him. He’s never been for sale … so we are working to try and find him a permanent home at one of the local Colorado zoos or aquariums. We definitely want to find him a home.”

While the creamsicle-colored crustaceans — who get their color from a genetic mutation — are exceedingly rare, the lobster that recently arrived in Pueblo isn’t the only one found at a Red Lobster in recent years.

Two such lobsters were found at different locations of the seafood chain in one month in 2022. They were aptly named “Cheddar” and “Biscuit” for Red Lobster’s popular cheddar biscuits.

But the Pueblo Red Lobster’s staff have perhaps chosen an even more appropriate name for an orange lobster found in Colorado — they’re calling him “Crush” as an homage to the legendary Denver Broncos “Orange Crush” defense of the late 1970s.

“Another reason we gravitated toward the name Crush is that my team here at the Pueblo Red Lobster, in particular, has really been put through the wringer since the middle of May since all those closures started happening because we are on that possible closure list,” Kastendieck said.

“But also … we’ve had some deaths in the family on our team, we’ve had some births of babies on the team, so we’ve really been going through a lot, and we just like to always think that even with any adversity that we’re being put through, we’re still here in Pueblo, we’re on Elizabeth, and we’re still crushing it. So the name was kind of twofold.”

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Chieftain Editor Zach Hillstrom can be reached at zhillstrom@gannett.com, or on X at @ZachHillstrom. Support local news, subscribe to the Pueblo Chieftain at subscribe.chieftain.com.

This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: A one in 30 million orange lobster was just found in Pueblo