15 Copycat TGI Friday's Recipes (2024)

FAQs

Why did they get rid of the TGI in Fridays? ›

The most obvious part of the rebrand is the name change. The restaurant is now simply known as Fridays, dropping the TGI acronym (which stands for 'Thank God it's'). The prefix had become “lost and confused” according to SomeOne. “It was time to be single-minded and confident,” the studio adds.

The first Fridays restaurant opened up on March 15th 1965, in First Avenue and 63rd Street in New York. Alan Stillman, a perfume saler, opened the first TGI Fridays™ restaurant, so that he gets to know single “stewardesses” that lived in his neighbor-hood.

Putting the TGI back into Friday

In 2020 the restaurant chain ditched TGI from its name in a bid to refresh the brand but just months into Scarlett's appointment the TGI was put back into Friday's. “My initial question [when joining] why would you change a brand name after a success 50 years,” she says.

SouthRock will continue to operate TGI Fridays locations normally while closing a few underperforming ones and will restructure through the bankruptcy procedure. On January 4, 2024, the chain abruptly closed 36 underperforming restaurants and sold eight more to former CEO Ray Blanchette.

The TGIF lineup began to experience sagging ratings throughout 1997–98 in part due to the audience fracture caused by its new competition from CBS's Block Party, which was enough to hurt ABC's ratings dominance on Fridays even though the rival block itself was a failure.

“What is the definitive TGIF series?” The original run of the Friday night block known as ABC's TGIF ran from Sept. 22, 1989 to Sept. 8, 2000. Thirty different series premiered during the time, and those series are all in contention on this list.

TGI Fridays has been struggling for years as consumer tastes have shifted. Now new owners are on the way to the casual restaurant chain. U.K.-based Hostmore, the chain's largest global franchisee, has entered into an agreement to buy the U.S. operations of the company.

Casual dining chain TGI Fridays said Wednesday it closed 36 company-owned restaurants throughout the US this week, impacting hundreds of workers. The company also said it unloaded eight company restaurants by selling them to the chain's former CEO, Ray Blanchette.