Alan Stillman

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb, 1996 by Paul Frumkin

In the 1988 film "Cocktail," Tom Cruise plays an ambitious young man taking business courses by day at City College in New York and bartending by night at a popular East Side singles bar to support himself. When one of his courses requires that he submit an original business plan for a hypothetical company, Cruise charts the national expansion of a similar fern-bar concept. Unaccountably, the professor teaching the class dismisses the plan as farfetched and gives Cruise's character an "F."

The irony of the scene cannot be lost on anyone who knows something about the history of the restaurant industry -- particularly if they had already recognized that the singles bar in which Cruise's character works is the original T.G.I. Friday's on First Avenue in Manhattan. In fact, the only thing farfetched about Cruise's plan was, had his character done a little research, that it had already been executed successfully 20 years earlier by a man named Alan Stillman.

Stillman's original T.G.I. Friday's -- generally regarded to be the first singles bar -- was not only responsible for spawning a successful restaurant chain, but also it gave rise to a countless number of copycats around the world.

But perhaps what is more important, some observers suggest, is that the Friday's singles-bar phenomenon emerged as a powerful vehicle for change.

Commenting back in 1984 on Stillman's innovation, Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in the New York Times, "When the social history of the late 20th century comes to be written, it is possible that the name Alan N. Stillman will figure in it."

Ten years later, Van Gelder's prediction was proved out when American Heritage magazine, in a historical appraisal of how American society has evolved over the past four decades, profiled Stillman as one of "Ten people who changed the way you live." "You've probably never heard of them, but these 10 people changed your life," Phil Patton wrote in the December 1994 issue of American Heritage. "Each of them is a big reason why your world today is so different from anyone's world in 1954."

Stillman himself did not claim to have been possessed of any remarkable social insight when he opened the first T.G.I Friday's on March 15, 1965. Rather, he maintained, he was just a 27-year-old looking for a way to supplement his income and have some fun. "While Friday's has been called the first singles meeting place, I have to admit that was not the original vision," he said. "We happened to be there at the right time in the right place. I will say that once we found out what was happening, we were smart enough to expand it."

But if the creation of Friday's was mostly luck, former partners and investors -- several of whom contributed to the success of Stillman's projects -- also talk about his uncanny ability to recognize trends and then find a novel way to market them. "His magic is that he has an eye for what would work," said Daniel Scoggin, one of Stillman's partners in the expansion of Friday's and later the president of the chain after it was sold to Carlson Cos. "He also has a brilliant marketing acumen. I used to call him the P.T. Barnum of the restaurant business," added Scoggin, who today is chairman, chief executive and president of Ground Round.

And yet, while Stillman may have revolutionized the restaurant industry with Friday's, he says he did not have the patience or the inclination to stay with it for long. After selling his stake to Carlson, the restless and energetic Stillman took the plunge into New York's fiercely competitive fine-dining market, opening restaurants that, like Friday's, "fill gaps in the market." Today, he co-owns and operates such highly rated restaurants as Smith & Wollensky, Manhattan Ocean Club, Park Avenue Cafe, the Post House and Cite in New York and Chicago. Smith & Wollensky, regarded as one of New York's top steak houses, generated sales of some $22 million in 1995, making it one of the highest-grossing restaurants in America. Together, all of Stillman's restaurants generated in excess of $60 million last year.

While his track record demonstrates his knack for opening restaurants that work, Stillman had no plans to enter the restaurant industry when he was growing up in Brooklyn. In 1953 he graduated from New York's High School for Music and Art with the intention of becoming a musician. Instead, he attended Bucknell University, studying commerce and finance and graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1957.

After a hitch as an Army lieutenant in Germany, he spent the next five years selling oils and chemicals used in cosmetics and food. During that period he lived in a fashionable section of midtown Manhattan, "sharing an apartment and bouncing from one cocktail party to another." He recalled that at the time "there were really no good places for singles to hang out. No places where a single girl felt comfortable going into a bar area."

In 1965 Stillman decided to try to change that and struck a deal to purchase a bar on First Avenue called the Good Tavern -- a place notable only in that it had a bullet hole in the front window. Together with a friend, Larry Horton, who then owned the Village Barn in downtown Manhattan, they raised $5,000 and borrowed another $5,000 from Stillman's mother to buy the bar. Three weeks and a few coats of paint later they opened it as T.G.I Friday's, a name Stillman maintained was crucial in helping to establish the concept's identity early in its development.