The chain that taught a generation of Long Islanders what loaded potato skins were is planning a comeback, and it is being run from Central Islip. TGI Fridays announced on September 29 that it has signed a development agreement with Bliss Bites LLC to open five new Fridays restaurants across New York State, the company's first domestic growth deal in more than a decade.

The franchisee behind it is not starting from scratch. Bliss Bites, led by hospitality veteran Vinod Chand, has also acquired the existing Fridays on North Research Place in Central Islip, which makes that restaurant the anchor of a six-location New York portfolio. The five new restaurants are planned over the next three years.

Down to two on the Island

It is hard to overstate how far the brand fell here first. Fridays was a Friday night fixture on Long Island for decades, the red-striped awning you could find near every mall and multiplex, the birthday dinner with the sparkler in the dessert. Then the chain's American business collapsed. Its U.S. operating company went through bankruptcy in late 2024, and dozens of restaurants across the country went dark in the months that followed.

The company's own location finder now lists exactly two Fridays on Long Island: the Central Islip restaurant on North Research Place and one at Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream. For a brand that once seemed to be everywhere from Nassau to the Hamptons highway exits, two survivors is a remarkable bottom.

Which is exactly what makes this deal a story. Chains shrink on Long Island all the time. They almost never pick the Island as the place to start growing again.

A homecoming, on paper at least

New York is not a random choice. Fridays opened its first restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side in 1965, and the company describes that corner bar and grill as the first casual dining restaurant of its kind in America. The format it invented there, a full bar, a big menu of American standards and a room designed for celebrating nothing in particular, became the template for an entire industry.

Sixty years later the company operates nearly 400 restaurants in almost 40 countries, and the overwhelming majority of them are overseas. The American footprint is the part that withered, which is why the company is treating a five-restaurant deal, modest by the standards of its 1980s expansion, as a landmark. It is the first time in over ten years that anyone has signed up to build new Fridays restaurants on American soil.

The deal is part of what the company calls its 1-2-3 Strategic Vision, a plan to reach more than 1,000 restaurants and 2 billion dollars in annual revenue by 2030. Those are ambitious numbers for a brand that spent the last two years closing locations, and most of that growth is expected to come from franchisees like Chand rather than from the company itself.

The man with the keys

Chand brings more than 35 years in hospitality to the brand, and in the announcement he made the Central Islip restaurant sound less like an acquisition than a declaration of faith. He described Fridays as a brand he already believed in, and the New York expansion as a beginning rather than a bet.

What the announcement did not say is where the five new restaurants will go. New York State is a big place, and there is no commitment yet that any of them land on Long Island. But the franchisee's operating base is a Suffolk County restaurant, the only Fridays he currently runs is here, and the Island's suburban dining corridors are precisely the habitat where the brand thrived the first time around.

What it means for your Friday night

In the short term, nothing changes at the Central Islip location except the name of the company running it, and it keeps pouring its signature drinks and stacking its signature appetizers as before. The real test arrives over the next three years, as Bliss Bites picks its five sites.

If you grew up here, you have a Fridays memory somewhere: a first date, a team dinner, an endless appetizer run with people you have since lost touch with. Whether the chain can make that mean something to a new generation is an open question. But for the first time in a decade, the question is being asked in New York, and the answer starts in a Central Islip parking lot.