TGI Friday's

TGI Friday’s (often shortened to “Friday’s” in most countries, previously stylized as “T.G.I. Friday’s”, and stylized “FRiDAY’S”, or “T.G.I.s” in Ireland and the United Kingdom) is an American restaurant chain focusing on casual dining. The company is a unit of the Sentinel Capital Partners and TriArtisan Capital Partners, who purchased the company from Carlson Companies in May 2014.Its name is taken from the expression TGIF.

Alan Stillman opened the first T.G.I. Friday's 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