TGI Fridays closes flagship Leicester Square site 

Troubled casual dining chain TGI Fridays has closed its flagship Leicester Square branch.

 

The restaurant had opened the landmark site in 2015, following a multi-million-pound investment.

 

It is now listed as permanently closed on Google.  

 

The closure leaves TGI Fridays without a central London site, although it still operates 50 restaurants nationwide including at the O2 in Greenwich and Westfield Stratford City.

 

A spokesperson for the causal dining chain said: “Our Leicester Square restaurant closed earlier this month. This was a mutual planned closure between the landlord and TGI Fridays. Since then, our focus has been the relocation of all our valued team members to other sites within our portfolio.

“We are proud to serve millions of customers across our 50 locations nationwide, including popular restaurants at the O2, Stratford and Wembley in London. We’d like to thank our loyal guests and our amazing team, as we look forward to exciting times ahead.”

 

TGI Fridays UK was sold out of administration to investors Breal Capital and Calveton for £9.55m in October.

 

The buyers paid the equivalent of around £187,000 for each of the chain’s 51 restaurants, securing over 2,000 jobs.

 

However, just over 1,000 jobs were lost when the remaining 36 TGI Fridays restaurants closed.

 

Both Hostmore and Thursdays UK, the former parent company and operator of TGI Fridays in the UK, had fallen into administration over the previous two months.

 

A report from administrators Teneo said the companies had struggled with a “poor trading performance in 2024” with like-for-like sales down by around 12%.