“I am a little crazy maybe,” admits Ray Blanchette, a former TGI Fridays kitchen manager who has taken on the revival of the bar-restaurant chain’s UK business in the face of blasting industry headwinds.
Blanchette’s family investment firm, Sugarloaf, rescued the Dallas-based parent business from administration in 2025. He then went on to pick up its UK arm in January after the local franchisee got into difficulties, retaining 33 UK restaurants but closing 16, with the loss of 456 jobs.
British restaurants and cafes have been struggling with higher staffing, energy and food costs while diner numbers have dwindled as households avoid eating out as their spare cash has been squeezed by similar forces. Increases in tax – including employers’ national insurance contributions and business rates – have layered on the pain.
However, Blanchette says he believes TGI, which has 420 restaurants in 42 countries, can get its mojo back in the UK and head to 1,000 outlets globally. “We have enough history and legacy to build off,” he says.
The chain was founded by the restaurateur Alan Stillman in New York in 1965 as the world’s first casual cocktail bar and restaurant,. The majority of its restaurants now, from the Philippines to Peru, are run by franchisees.
TGI is known for its red and white stripes, decor packed with vintage paraphernalia, and all-American cuisine, from burgers to Kansas-style beef ribs and Texas mixed grills.
In the UK it has had a rocky history since its 1990s heyday, with Blanchette’s rescue deal coming less than 18 months after it was bought out of administration by two private equity firms, Calveton UK and Breal Capital, which owned upmarket restaurants including Le Pont de la Tour, Quaglino’s and Coq d’Argent. That deal involved the closure of about 35 restaurants.
Blanchette’s investment firm now controls the global master franchise for TGI, and his Sugarloaf Hospitality business directly runs 11 US outlets and the UK restaurants.
“My company has no private equity investment – it’s a family business, my business, and I bought [TGI] intending [for us] to own it for the next 100 years,” he says, adding that he will be making decisions with a “long-term view” and not just to seek short-term profit.
Starting out in the kitchens of a TGI restaurant in Philadelphia in 1989, Blanchette rose to become president of the firm before he left in 2014 for stints at chains including Au Bon Pain and Ruby Tuesday.
But TGI drew him back in: he returned to run it for five years until 2023, and then, two years later, secured the master franchise for the US business and 11 restaurants after it fell into Chapter 11, the insolvency process.
“I know this brand is important in the UK,” he says, speaking at TGI’s Birmingham restaurant.
On taking on the British business, Blanchette found parts of it had been left underfunded. At 14 sites, almost half the current chain, there was no heating, and other outlets had refrigerators that did not work.
Blanchette says he is now investing more than £2.5m on top of regular maintenance bills in revamping restaurants and kitchen kit, including updating memorabilia, and in developing coaches to train up staff.
He says that in the 1990s TGI in the UK was “a brand with a good reputation, and that was well earned”, with buzzy bar-restaurants where cocktail waiters could mix up drinks with panache.
However, he claims that under its more recent owners the menu had become too expensive, there had been too little investment in the restaurants and staff training had gone, so that “it all started to get watered down”.
“We saw restaurants in a horrible condition,” he says. “That’s now sorted.”
After claiming to have read every one of the hundreds of thousands of Google and Yelp reviews on TGI’s UK business, Blanchette believes a turnaround is possible. “We are getting back to what people expect from us. It is intended to be a little over the top and fun,” he says.
Chefs have been retrained to cook the new menu from scratch, and a two-courses plus drink value menu at £12.49 has been introduced as well as more affordable appetisers and sharing plates that can be nibbled alongside drinks.
“Some appetisers, some margaritas and Long Island iced teas, I don’t know how that goes out of style,” he says.
However, Blanchette adds his voice to the many UK bosses criticising the government over costs, describing the current tax regime for high street businesses as “problematic” and arguing that it stifles growth.
He is hopeful of change as hospitality is one of the UK’s biggest employers. “Eventually government has got to realise that or it is going to be in a real lot of hurt. You will have people come to London to see the sites and not have anywhere to eat.”
TGI is unlikely to open more UK restaurants in the coming year – unless a site comes up in London, where it once had bustling sites in Covent Garden and on Piccadilly.
“I certainly want to expand but there are things to do first,” Blanchette says. “We are looking through the windshield, not the rear-view mirror. This is not about going back to the 90s.”
He says even when families are stretched financially they still want to eat out and a treat. “If you are warmly greeted in a restaurant, you relax and say ‘let’s have some fun’.”
