Huge UK restaurant chain with 87 sites which collapsed into administration could be saved as rescue deal ‘nearly agreed’

A HUGE UK restaurant chain with 87 sites which collapsed into administration is reportedly close to being saved in a rescue deal.

After balancing on the brink of losing all UK sites forever, TGI Fridays may be protected by a deal being negotiated this weekend.

The deal would save more than 2,000 jobs, as reported by Sky News, as buyers Breal Capital and Calveton could secure the majority of TGI Fridays branches by tomorrow.

The company co-own a restaurant business called D&D London that specialise in high-end venues.

Insiders claimed the rescue deal could include up to 55 of the chain’s 87 sites and at least 2,000 of its workforce.

However, this would still leave round 1,000 jobs lost.

It comes after TGI Fridays collapsed into administration earlier this year with 87 stores put up for sale.

Hostmore, which owns TGI in this country, was scrambling to sell the franchise so it could continue to operate under new ownership.

The hospitality firm said it had appointed joint administrators from Teneo and planned to sell all of its 87 UK locations to new owners by the end of September.

However, it announced last month that it was not expecting to “recover any meaningful value” from the sale of sites.

This would mean it would earn less from the sale than it owes to creditors and banks.

It saw Hostmore abandon the £177million deal.

News of the collapse caused shares in the London-listed company tank by more than 90 per cent.

After first opening in Birmingham, TGI Fridays spread rapidly around the country with its popular format of casual American bistro-style dining.

Serving staff were known as Dub Dubs, and taught the art of entertaining their customers with jokes, banter, and other gimmicks like juggling and magic tricks, all performed with impeccable table craft and cheeriness.

In the early 1990s, the Covent Garden branch of T.G.I. Friday’s was reported to be the busiest restaurant in Europe.

The chain was acquired by a private equity firm 10 years ago, with a rebrand removing all the punctuation from the restaurant name to make it TGI Fridays.

In 2021, the company was spun out into Hostmore, a listed company and the restaurants were briefly renamed just ‘Fridays’ before marketing chiefs found customers still called it ‘TGI’s’ and restored the original name.

In recent times the chain restaurant’s fortunes have faded, and Hostmore revealed that UK sales have fallen by more than a tenth this year, compared with last year.

Now Hostmore is in the process of selling its UK restaurants to new owners, with the aim of becoming a fully franchise-operated model.

TGI Fridays’ biggest market is in the US where there are 128 restaurants, including franchised sites, and it operates more than 270 in countries around the world.