Outback Steakhouse Satanic Cult? Restaurant Chain Responds To Conspiracy Theory

Another day, another bizarre conspiracy theory involving a seemingly innocuous restaurant and satanic occultism. A few internet sleuths got the better of Outback Steakhouse recently after they uncovered a pattern of stars — more specifically, pentagrams — in the locations of the restaurant chain across cities nationwide.

The conspiracy appears to have originated from a tweet by user @eatmyaesthetics, who on Thursday posted a series of screengrabs of the purported pentagram patterns of Outback Steakhouse locations in four areas: Indianapolis, New York City, Mesa in Arizona as well as an area outside of Atlanta.

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“Wtf is Outback Steakhouse planning,” the user captioned the Thursday tweet, which was “liked” nearly 300,000 times and had 117,000 retweets by Monday afternoon.

Reached for comment by International Business Times, a spokesperson for Bloomin’ Brands, Inc., which owns Outback Steakhouse, confirmed that the restaurant is not involved with any cult — satanic or otherwise.

“Once this was brought to our attention, we took a look at the map and saw something completely different!” the spokesperson told IBT. “And, no, of course we’re not involved with any cult.”

Following the initial tweet, other sleuths located Outback Steakhouse location pentagrams in other nationwide cities. “NC in on it,” wrote user @julesjune_, who shared a screengrab of an area in North Carolina.

“Y’all may be on to something,” wrote user @hanginwitcoop, who shared a pentagram located in Virginia.

User @QueenIdle wrote, “Outback Steakhouse is slaughtering cows and sacrificing them to SATAN: a conspiracy theory.”

More got in on the meme as well:

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Outback Steakhouse’s main Twitter account, which regularly responds to its fans, addressed the allegations of satanic occultism in a tweet Friday. Sharing an image of its Bloomin’ Onion transposed over a Google Maps screen grab of Tampa, Florida — the location of its headquarters — the restaurant chain wrote simply, “Plot twist.”

The response had been “liked” more than 16,000 times and retweeted by 3,000 users as of Monday.