page_title: TGI Fridays
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: TGI Fridays / History
caption_attribution_description: TGI Friday's Restaurant 6/2014 Waterbury CT. by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube.
context_page_description: TGI Fridays is an American restaurant chain focusing on casual dining. The company is owned by TriArtisan Capital, a New York-based private equity firm, that purchased the company from Sentinel Partners in October 2019. The name is asserted to stand for "Thank God It's Friday", although as of 2010 some television commercials for the chain have also made use of the alternative phrase, "Thank Goodness It's Friday."
context_section_description: Alan Stillman opened the first TGI Fridays restaurant in 1965, in New York. He lived in a neighborhood with many airline stewardesses, fashion models, secretaries, and other young, single people on the East Side of Manhattan near the Queensboro Bridge, and hoped that opening a bar would help him meet women. At the time, Stillman's choices for socializing were non-public cocktail parties or "guys' beer-drinking hangout" bars that women usually did not visit; he recalled that "there was no public place for people between, say, twenty-three to thirty-seven years old, to meet." He sought to recreate the comfortable cocktail party atmosphere in public despite having no experience in the restaurant business.
  With $5,000 of his own money and $5,000 borrowed from his mother, Stillman purchased a bar he often visited, The Good Tavern at the corner of 63rd Street and First Avenue, and renamed it TGI Fridays after the expression "Thank God it's Friday!" from his years at Bucknell University. The new restaurant, which opened on March 15, 1965, served standard American cuisine, bar food, and alcoholic beverages, but emphasized food quality and preparation. The exterior featured a red-and-white striped awning and blue paint; the Gay Nineties interior included American Made Tiffany Style Lamps, mostly by the Somers Family, wooden floors, Bentwood chairs, and striped tablecloths; and the bar area added brass rails and stained glass. The employees were young and wore red-and-white striped soccer shirts, and every time someone had a birthday, the entire restaurant crew came around with a cake and sang TGI Fridays' traditional birthday song. Footage of interviews with patrons from this TGI Fridays was featured in Robert Downey Sr.'s film No More Excuses (1968). The first location closed in 1994 and is now a British pub called "Baker Street"; the brass rails are still there.
  Although Malachy McCourt's nearby eponymous bar preceded TGI Fridays and Stillman credited the media for creating the term, he had unintentionally created one of the first singles bars. It benefited from the near-simultaneous availability of the birth-control pill and Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique:
  I don’t think there was anything else like it at the time. Before TGI Fridays, four single twenty-five year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time. They went to people’s apartments for cocktail parties or they might go to a real restaurant for a date or for somebody’s birthday, but they weren’t going out with each other to a bar for a casual dinner and drinks because there was no such place for them to go.
  TGI Fridays was one of the first to use promotions such as ladies' night, and Stillman achieved his hopes of meeting women; "Have you seen the movie Cocktail? Tom Cruise played me!...Why do girls want to date the bartender? To this day, I’m not sure that I get it." He and the restaurant benefited from its location—according to Stillman, 480 stewardesses lived in the apartment building next door—and received publicity in national magazines. TGI Fridays became so popular that it had to install ropes to create an area for those waiting in line, also unusual at the time for a restaurant. A competitor, Maxwell's Plum, opened across the street, and others soon followed.
  With fellow Bucknell graduate Ben Benson, Stillman opened other restaurants, including Tuesday's, Thursday's, Wednesday's, and Ice Cream Sunday's. Franchising of TGI Fridays began two years after the Manhattan location opened, in Memphis, Tennessee's  Overton Square district; that location has since closed. In 1971, Daniel R. Scoggin acquired the rights to eight major midwest cities. In 1972, he opened with the first of a new prototype in Dallas.  The raised square bar and multilevel dining became the company standard. Dallas doubled the sales and tripled profits of TGI Fridays previous best. Families began visiting the new suburban locations during the day for casual food; "it took six or seven years, but T.G.I. Fridays became a very differen
caption: TGI Fridays in Waterbury, Connecticut in June 2014.
exif: {"Image Make": "Apple", "Image Model": "iPod touch", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "7.1.1", "Image DateTime": "2014:06:03 14:09:52", "Image ExifOffset": "218", "Image LensSpecification": "[33/10, 33/10, 12/5, 12/5]", "Image LensMake": "Apple", "Image LensModel": "iPod touch back camera 3.3mm f/2.4", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/698", "EXIF FNumber": "12/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "32", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2014:06:03 14:09:52", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2014:06:03 14:09:52", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "3193/338", "EXIF ApertureValue": "4845/1918", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "6649/696", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "33/10", "EXIF SubjectArea": "[1295, 967, 699, 696]", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "775", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "775", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2490", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1643", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "484/483", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "33", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF OffsetSchema": "0"}