TGI Friday’s is a casual-dining conglomerate with more than nine hundred restaurants in sixty countries. The company was founded in 1965 by Alan Stillman (1936), a perfume salesman who bought a neighborhood bar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and spruced up the decor and the menu in hopes of attracting the stewardesses and models who lived nearby. The original TGI Friday’s popularized the concept of the singles bar, propitiously, at the dawn of the sexual revolution. At a time when many bars were still mired in the gender-segregated drinking culture of the nineteenth century, Friday’s was a sort of domesticated saloon—prettified with Tiffany lamps, bentwood chairs, and potted plants (spawning the nickname “fern bar”) and enlivened with bartenders dressed in red-and-white-striped soccer shirts and serving Harvey Wallbangers. See fern bars and Harvey Wallbanger. It did indeed attract young women, and quickly inspired imitators. It launched its first franchise in Memphis in 1970; restaurants in Nashville and Little Rock soon followed. In 1972, Stillman and franchise partners Dan Scoggin and Walt Henrion opened a large Friday’s in Dallas (where the company would be headquartered after its purchase in 1975 by Carlson Companies, Inc.). Scoggin and Henrion ushered in greater organization, tiered seating, and an expanded menu, which popularized casual-dining staples such as loaded potato skins. The bar remained the focal point of Friday’s, however, and the chain made “happy hour” an institution. It also paid a great deal of attention to training its bartenders, developing a notably rigorous training program. By the 1980s, the chain’s training went beyond learning the classics and the fanciful drinks of the day and into flair bartending, in which Friday’s was a pioneer. It was John Bandy, who won Friday’s first Bartender Olympics (now the World Bartender Championship), who trained Tom Cruise and Bryan Brown, the stars of the 1988 movie Cocktail, in their bottle-throwing and other flair moves. See film, spirits and cocktails in. Over time, Fridays morphed into a family-friendly beacon of American dining as well as a purveyor of packaged foods inspired by its menu. Carlson Companies sold Fridays to Sentinel Capital Partners and TriArtisan Capital Partners in 2014 for $800 million.
Twilley, Nicola. “How T.G.I. Friday’s Helped Invent the Singles Bar.” New Yorker, July 2, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-t-g-i-fridays-helped-invent-the-singles-bar (accessed March 12, 2021).
By: Lauren Clark