TGI Fridays’ UK owner goes into administration

When Alan Stillman opened the first TGI Fridays in 1965 in New York, it proved a sensation, with queues of customers snaking around the block and bartenders mixing myriad cocktails guided by the promise: “In here, it’s always Friday.”
Twenty-one years later, Whitbread opened the UK’s first TGI Fridays, in a converted former Wendy’s burger restaurant in Birmingham, but it was the Covent Garden site that stole the limelight, generating annual turnover of £1 million and, it was said, altering the British dining scene “beyond recognition”.
Those halcyon days are gone. Hostmore, the listed parent company of Fridays, confirmed that it had “resolved to file for administration” and asked for trading in its shares to be suspended. It said it had already asked for the company to be delisted and wound up.
However, there is a chance that the TGI Fridays restaurants may yet survive. The company said it continued to seek a buyer for its 87 company-owned stores across the UK, and Thursdays (UK), its trading subsidiary, continued to operate normally. However, it said that even the highest bid was too low to cover its liabilities and any proceeds from the sale would be “below the par value”.
There have been suggestions that two family offices were in strong contention to buy the majority of the business. As many as 20 of the 87 restaurants are thought to be at risk of closure.
The board said it would be appointing Daniel Smith and Julian Heathcote from Teneo Financial Advisory as joint administrators.
Sacha Lord, a night-time economy adviser, said: “As a kid, TGI Fridays was once the place to be seen. Everyone of a certain generation would have had, or wanted, their birthday party there after school, and I’m sure we can all delight in the childhood memories that the restaurant evokes.“The decline of the group over the past decade has been sad to watch, but is a case in point of the need for the sector to evolve with the times. There’s a tipping point between novelty and becoming dated, and I fear that’s been the presiding factor over this downfall.”
More recently, Hostmore’s efforts to create a bigger, more viable business by acquiring the US owner of the Fridays franchise were scuppered when an American corporate securitisation was terminated.
Hostmore was demerged from Electra Private Equity in November 2021 at a share price of 147p. Its shares were suspended on Wednesday at 0.155p, down 8.8 per cent or 0.015p on the day.