A group of Florida friends thought it would be fun to open a restaurant in the 1980s that “they couldn’t get kicked out of.” Now in their 70s, they’re buying back franchises with a plan to restore the brand—from the signature wings to the orange shorts—to its cheeky glory.
Last winter, Neil Kiefer, CEO of the Original Hooters Founders Group, heard that the franchisor and operator of the Florida-based restaurant chain, known as Hooters of America, was about to go bankrupt. So the 73-year-old Kiefer, a longtime friend of the three living cofounders of the chicken wing empire, called them up and laid their options on the table.
The group’s 22 locations in Florida and Chicago were averaging $4.7 million in annual sales per location, Kiefer explained, while Hooters of America’s 150 locations were bringing in less than half that—$2.3 million each. Kiefer believed they could turn around the failing restaurants and made a bold proposal: “I can drop this whole thing and we’ll just exist as we have in the territories we have,” he told them, “or we can take a bigger risk.”
The original group—Gil DiGiannantonio, 77, Edward Droste, 74, and Dennis Johnson, 74—told Kiefer they were in. “We need to open a restaurant like a hole in the head,” Droste tells Forbes. “But we’ve always been America’s neighborhood oasis and, now more than ever, America needs us.”
Kiefer and the original Hooters crew could easily be enjoying their golden years on golf courses or the beaches of Florida. Instead, they are leading a deal to acquire 111 Hooters locations out of bankruptcy and planning to invest about $40 million into turning around the challenged chain. Kiefer, who was the cofounders’ attorney when Hooters was founded in Clearwater, Florida in 1983, says the group feels an emotional connection to the chain and don’t want to see the brand die.
“We had some soul searching,” says Kiefer. “We don’t want to leave the Hooters world in the condition it is in. We have a moral obligation.”
Sign Of The Timing: The founders’ corporate registration for Hooters arrived on April Fool’s Day 1983, which seemed appropriate to them because they had no restaurant experience.
courtesy of The Original Hooters Group
Last month, a Texas bankruptcy judge gave approval their plan, and final step is expected next week. Kiefer is now embarking on a transformation. That will start, he says, with Hooters returning to a more wholesome image. Nearly half of the 30 highest-volume Hooters restaurants in the U.S. are operated by Kiefer’s Hooters Inc. group. The design hews to the original “Florida themed beach shack” vibe with servers, known as Hooters Girls, in tight white t-shirts and (slightly) longer orange shorts. Kiefer believes the private equity owners of Hooters of America, Nord Bay Capital and TriArtisan Capital Advisor, “oversexualized the concept” by leaning into its reputation as a “breastaurant.” Kiefer’s group will acquire about 54 locations, while an operator called Hoot Owl LLC, which includes some of the first Hooters franchisees, will acquire another 57.
Coming back for seconds at Hooters won’t be easy. Says DiGiannantonio, who created the original Hooters menu: “If you had a bad day at work, you’d come into Hooters and feel good. If you had a great day at work, you’d come to Hooters and celebrate. They come back because the service is great. But the food has got to be there, too. So taking that back and making it right is going to be a challenge, but we’re ready for it.”
“It’s not a guaranteed slam dunk,” Kiefer admits. “We have to win customers back, and that’s not going to happen overnight just because the court says, Okay, take it over.”
Before the deal, the founders’ Hooters Inc. had estimated annual revenue of over $100 million, and healthy net profit margins that Forbes estimates at 7%. Tripling its footprint might supersize sales and profits, but it equally could be a disastrous financial drain.
Hooters bankruptcy follows several Chapter 11 filings from aging mid-sized restaurant chains in recent years, including Red Lobster, TGI Fridays and Buca Di Beppo, which have lost customers amid internal cost-cutting and an influx of new chains. Says former chairman of Buca Di Beppo and founder of Planet Hollywood Robert Earl, who acquired Buca Di Beppo in 2008 for $9.7 million and owned it until it filed for bankruptcy in 2024, which saw the Italian chain sold to its lender Main Street Capital Corp. for $27 million: “Who would have the best chance of getting it back to scratch? It’d be the founders.”
But Earl adds, “For legacy brands, it’s difficult to reinvent yourself—if it’s just the same white shirt and orange shorts, it’s not enough.”
In the early ‘80s, longtime friends and Clearwater businessmen—DiGiannantonio, a liquor salesman, Droste, a real estate executive, Johnson, a brick mason by trade, as well as L.D. Stewart, a painting contractor, Ken Wimmer, a partner in a painting business, and “Uncle Billy” Ranieri, a retired service station owner—had a running joke that they should start a restaurant that “they couldn’t get kicked out of.” They say it was all kidding around until their corporate registration for Hooters came back—on April Fool’s Day 1983. With that propitious sign from the universe, the entrepreneurs—then in their early 30s—decided they had to follow through, even though no one had restaurant experience.
“It added to the lore,” recalls Kiefer, who moved away from Florida for law school but returned at 31 to find his friends had a business idea that needed legal help.
“Everybody stayed in their lane and did their job, and it really worked well,” DiGiannantonio recalls. “And Neil just happened to put everybody together. We would’ve killed each other.”
By October 1983, they turned a former nightclub into a wood-paneled restaurant, hired the first Hooters Girl from a local bikini contest, and decided that chicken wings would be one of Hooters’ signature items. The first six months were slow. DiGiannantonio, who headed up the food end of the business in the early days, recalls chiding Droste, who led marketing, one day.
“Where the hell are the customers?” DiGiannantonio asked in the early months, recalling how Droste solved the problem. “He went out and rented a chicken costume and stood on the corner dancing at the stoplight.”
Adds Droste: “Everybody kept telling us we were going to fail. So Denny and I put a tombstone out in front, and we put the names of all the businesses that had failed in the location that we were at—to have some fun with the fact that nobody thought we were going to succeed.”
But once they got customers actually through the door, they often returned. Things picked up and during Hooters’ second year —the Super Bowl was in Tampa that year, and after Washington’s star fullback stopped by for a quick bite, he later returned with limousines filled of teammates. Wait times soared to up to three hours, and the original Hooters ended 1984 with $1.1 million in revenue.
Then restaurant developer Hugh Connerty was in the area to start another concept, but got derailed after having lunch at Hooters and approached the group to see if they were interested in expanding through a licensing deal. They were. Kiefer, as outside counsel, helped put together the deal and created a multi-tier structure in which the founders’ Hooters Inc. owned the intellectual property of Hooters, which it then licensed to the newly formed operator. Then after bringing in a group of Atlanta based investors, the business started franchising as Hooters of America.
Hooters of America franchising boomed by 1989, as Robert Brooks, one of the Atlanta-based investors, bought majority control of the company and became chairman. But Brooks didn’t like the terms of the licensing deal Kiefer had struck and stopped abiding by it.
With Brooks running the booming Hooters of America, in 1992, the cofounders asked Kiefer if he would run the original Hooters full-time. “I took a sabbatical from my law firm, and here I sit 32 years later,” he says. The leadership was a needed counter-balance for Kiefer and the cofounders’ Hooters Inc., as Brooks’ Hooters of America started playing fast and loose with the franchising agreement. Kiefer and the founders were particularly upset when the recipe for its blue cheese sauce changed, as well as when Hooters of America tried to change the material of the waitresses’ tops to a Lycra fabric. The dispute ended up leading to two lawsuits—and starting the schism that the original Hooters founders are now trying to heal.
Ultimately, in 2001, Brooks paid $60 million—or 18 times revenue—to buy the intellectual property rights to Hooters. Kiefer’s Hooters Inc. retained ownership of the territories of Tampa, Florida, just north of Clearwater, New York City and Chicago, as well as certain rights, including the right to build a Hooters casino in Las Vegas (which it did in 2006) and also the right to sell its beloved Hooters’ wing sauce in grocery stores (which it still sells alongside hot sauce and seasoning salt across 10,000 stores).
High-Flying: The original founders believe the team that managed Hooters after them expanded too far with ventures such as Hooters Air in 2003 and a Hooters casino in Las Vegas three years later. Both failed.
Ethan Miller/Getty Images; Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images
Meanwhile, Brooks—who called himself the “Worldwide Wing Commander”—started a short-lived Hooters airline in 2003 (it flew to 15 destinations including Atlanta and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina), piling on debt before it was grounded three years later due to rising fuel prices. His other brand extensions helped to make Hooters the pop culture icon it is today with a Hooters-branded magazine, a pro golf tour, a casino, a stock car racing series, and even a credit card. But Brooks died unexpectedly in 2006 at age 69 and a long court battle over Hooters’ ownership ensued.
As investors fought over ownership of Hooters of America, it still hit its peak in sales in 2009 with $1.2 billion, according to Technomic. It had 400 restaurants at the time. But by 2011, the ownership case ended, and Hooters of America sold to a group of private investors, including HIG Capital and Chanticleer Holdings. Sales had already started to slide, dropping 6.5% from the previous year to just over $1 billion.
In 2019, Hooters of America was sold again to private equity firms Nord Bay Capital and TriArtisan Capital, after nearly a year on the market. New ownership didn’t help: sales continued to decline, hitting $986 million that year, according to Technomic, and then the pandemic hit. Sales fell 27% to just over $700 million in 2020.
Kiefer says there wasn’t enough investment in the Hooters of America restaurants. The challenged chain continued to struggle. Sales per location was $3.1 million on average when the investors took over but quickly fell into the $2 million range as the pandemic dragged on.
In 2024, Hooters of America—with annual sales of about $678 million, down 15% from the prior year—closed several dozen locations across Florida, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Texas and Virginia. But it wasn’t enough. By the time of its bankruptcy in March 2025, there were 150 restaurants.
“This is our baby,” says DiGiannantonio. “To see it go down the toilet, it broke our hearts. And it was embarrassing to go to the country club or the grocery store and hear, ‘Hey, I hear you guys are filing bankruptcy.’ That’s all we kept on hearing. I’d say, ‘Well, it’s not really us.’”
Which is why Droste says they had to try to put the chain back on track: “It was a tough decision to make, but it was one that wasn’t that difficult for us.”
Turning around those failed locations will now require competing in an increasingly competitive landscape for chicken wing lovers. In addition to Buffalo Wild Wings (which has more than 1,300 locations in the United States and systemwide sales of $4 billion, according to Technomic), Wingstop (over 2,200; $4.2 billion) and Zaxby’s (nearly 1,000; $2.6 billion), there are also countless regional wing spots, while major pizza chains like Domino’s, Papa John’s and Pizza Hut have added wings to their menus.
But Kiefer, DiGiannantonio, Droste and Johnson still believe there’s a place for the original Hooters formula, and they expect to see the restaurants thrive again as neighborhood hangouts across the country. “We’ve seen how deep our customer loyalty is,” Johnson says. “That was a surprise to us, that we’ve cultivated that.”
The first priority, Kiefer says, is assessing which locations have health and safety issues, since “many are in physical disrepair.” Then Kiefer will focus on training staff and transitioning the food back to the original Hooters menu—more than three-quarters of sales are from food, not drinks, so streamlining the menu and boosting quality is key, he says. The original menu had no preservatives, the chicken wings were fresh (not frozen), and the sauces were homemade. Kiefer describes the upcoming overhaul as “revealing to the rest of America the way it should have been done.”
DiGiannantonio explains it another way, with a story from years ago, when his kids went to a local Catholic school that had a nun as principal. As DiGiannantonio tells it, the principal asked for a donation, and he said he had it ready for her to pick up at the restaurant. She came to the office across the street but DiGiannantonio was firm, the check was waiting for her at Hooters. “I can’t go into Hooters,” he recalls the nun saying. So he suggested they walk over together. Inside, they found a few tables of kids who had just played baseball, a group of women who had been shopping, and some lawyers in suits on their lunch break. The nun was surprised by how wholesome the atmosphere was. “I understand what you mean by, ‘this is what a neighborhood restaurant is all about,’” she told him.
“We have to stabilize it from getting worse,” Kiefer says, “Just because we take it over Monday doesn’t mean Tuesday everything’s going to be right.” The Hooters founders are committed to not taking any profit out of the restaurants for at least several years, he adds: “We’re going to plow that money back in to reinvest in the property rather than take money out of the company.”
That reinvestment will be necessary, as Kiefer and the founders plan the transformation of a lifetime. “Sooner or later, we’re going to be dead,” Kiefer says, “and we want to keep this thing going.”