TGI Fridays in Waterbury, Connecticut in June 2014.
TGI Fridays started as a singles bar, riding the wave of the sexual revolution in the 1960s. It evolved to become a family favorite. Now, as the chain struggles to remain relevant, a UK franchise is taking Fridays back to its roots.
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.
