The future of TGI Fridays is in doubt after the company's owner suffered a near-total collapse in its share price and put all UK restaurants up for sale. TGI Fridays has 87 outlets around the country and the owners are hoping to complete a rapid sale of all of them by the end of this month.
The restaurant chain - which has branches in Cabot Circus and Cribbs Causeway - first opened in the UK in the 1980s and has been a popular destination for birthday parties and cocktail nights for the last 40 years. But the firm's UK owner, Hostmore, has seen its share price collapse in the last week after it announced it had dropped ambitious plans to buy up outlets in the US.
Shares in the London-listed company were all but wiped out following the announcement. The share price has fallen by 96 per cent since the start of this month to close yesterday at 22p.
Administrators are now on alert at the British arm of TGI amid fears the chain could vanish from the High Street. The first branch of T.G.I. Friday's was opened in New York in 1965 to celebrate weekend dining - the name means 'Thank God It's Friday - and in 1986 the brand was imported to the UK.
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After first opening in Birmingham, the chain spread rapidly around the country with its popular format of casual American bistro-style dining. Serving staff were known as Dub Dubs, and taught the art of entertaining their customers with jokes, banter, and other gimmicks like juggling and magic tricks, all performed with impeccable table craft and cheeriness.
TGIs staff even trained Tom Cruise for his role in the 1988 movie Cocktail. In the early 1990s, the Covent Garden branch of T.G.I. Friday's was reported to be the busiest restaurant in Europe.
The chain was acquired by a private equity firm ten years ago, with a rebrand removing all the punctuation from the restaurant name to make it TGI Fridays. In 2021, the company was spun out into Hostmore, a listed company and the restaurants were briefly renamed just 'Fridays' before marketing chiefs found customers still called it 'TGI's' and restored the original name.
In recent times the chain restaurant's fortunes have faded, and Hostmore revealed that UK sales have fallen by more than a tenth this year, compared with last year. Now Hostmore is in the process of selling its UK restaurants to new owners, with the aim of becoming a fully franchise-operated model.
The sale process, which is predicted to be completed by the end of the month, is expected to result in Hostmore being wound up and delisted from the London Stock Exchange. Its UK restaurants, which have a New York-influenced food and cocktails menu, continue to stay open as normal.
It has not been confirmed if all of TGI's restaurants could be saved, or just a selection, with others potentially being taken over by another chain.
