TGI Fridays: Alan Stillman's Singles Bar, Potato Skins and Chapter 11

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In 1965 Alan Stillman, who had no restaurant experience, used $5,000 of his savings and $5,000 borrowed from his mother to buy The Good Tavern, a bar near the Queensboro Bridge on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a neighborhood full of young singles and flight attendants. He renamed it with the Bucknell phrase Thank God It's Friday, painted it blue with red and white striped awnings, hired athletic bartenders in striped soccer shirts and popularized ladies night. Arriving alongside the birth control pill and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, it gave young women a place to go out without a date. Velvet ropes went up, Maxwell's Plum opened across the street, and patrons appear in Robert Downey Sr.'s 1968 film No More Excuses.

Daniel R. Scoggin took Midwest franchise rights and opened a 1972 Dallas prototype with multi-level dining, a raised central bar, scratch cooking, potato skins, frozen drinks and the Bartender Olympics; it doubled the sales and tripled the profits of any earlier location. Stillman merged into Scoggin's company, Carlson Companies bought the chain in 1975, and Stillman went on to found Smith & Wollensky. Fridays went public with Goldman Sachs in 1983, entered the U.K. with Whitbread and by 2008 had 601 U.S. restaurants and $2 billion in revenue. Sales fell to $728 million by 2023 as private equity owners, including Sentinel Capital and TriArtisan, loaded it with debt.

• Stillman claimed his showman bartenders inspired Tom Cruise's character in Cocktail, though the bar Malachy's is said to have predated Fridays.
• Classic stores display a propeller for the bar as engine and a rowing scull holding saddle shoes and champagne for teamwork, leadership and celebration.
• New Jersey's 2013 Operation Swill raided 17 franchise locations that were refilling top-shelf bottles with cheap liquor.
• In 2018 U.K. waiters struck over a policy sending 20 percent of their card tips to kitchen staff, and a 2022 suit over licensed mozzarella sticks with no mozzarella settled for $900,000.
• The U.K. operator entered administration in September 2024 after missing a bondholder filing, the U.S. company filed for Chapter 11 in November 2024, and the U.K. business collapsed again by early 2026.