Hooters Is Making a PG-13 Pitch: No Bikinis, More Families in Restaurants

A plan is taking shape to put Hooters into bankruptcy and return control of the brand to the Florida businessmen who founded it decades ago. Bloomberg's Eliza Ronalds-Hannon reports on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily.

Their pitch began last year, as the latest private equity owners of Hooters of America — the corporate entity that now owns the brand — shuttered locations and struggled to manage a roughly $350 million debt load. Neil Kiefer, chief executive officer of the founder-owned unit, HMC Hospitality Group, saw a way to turn things around: Take charge and apply what has worked for them in their restaurants in Florida and Illinois to the brand nationwide.

“I’m calling it a re-Hooterization,” Kiefer, seated at a table at the Clearwater location as the Brigham Young and Virginia Commonwealth men’s basketball teams faced off in the background, said in an interview.

What hurt the brand, as the founders see it, were decisions by its private equity overlords that took it away from its roots as a beachy destination offering good food and good service that was also family-friendly. Helping crystallize that view: a 2021 decision by Hooters of America to introduce new waitress uniforms that looked more like underwear than the retro jogging shorts the original Hooters referenced, along with theme nights where servers wore only bikinis.

“You go to some parts of the country and people say, ‘Oh I could never go to Hooters, my wife would kill me,”’ Kiefer said. “That’s depressing to us. We want to change that.”

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