Frankie & Benny's Closes on Rigby Road

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Frankie & Benny’s became a familiar part of Blackpool’s Festival Leisure Park on Rigby Road during the 2000s, occupying a purpose-built restaurant close to the Odeon Cinema. The American-Italian themed chain had first appeared in Britain in 1995 and grew particularly rapidly at multiplex cinemas and leisure parks, where restaurants could benefit from families combining a meal with a trip to the cinema. The precise opening date of the Blackpool restaurant has proved difficult to establish, but contemporary evidence confirms that it was trading by September 2006. Blackpool Council’s licensing records subsequently document the restaurant at Festival Leisure Park from at least January 2008, when The Restaurant Group (UK) Ltd was recorded as the operator. The premises was licensed for the sale of alcohol and late-night refreshments. Its location reflected the business model behind much of Frankie & Benny’s expansion. Rather than relying principally on traditional town centres, its parent company increasingly concentrated on leisure destinations. By 2006 The Restaurant Group described itself as operating predominantly in leisure locations and airports, with Frankie & Benny’s reaching 139 restaurants that year after 25 new openings. The company was planning another 15 to 20 Frankie & Benny’s restaurants for 2007.

In Blackpool, Festival Leisure Park provided almost the ideal setting for that strategy. The restaurant stood alongside the multiplex cinema and within a development reached from Rigby Road, with extensive shared parking. A later planning assessment described Festival Leisure Park as a mixed retail and entertainment development containing the cinema, McDonald’s, a Bannatyne’s Health Club and Spa, and Frankie & Benny’s, with hundreds of shared parking spaces.

For many customers the restaurant and cinema effectively operated as parts of the same evening out. Frankie & Benny’s offered a deliberately theatrical version of an Italian-American neighbourhood restaurant, with vintage photographs, dark timber, booth seating and a soundtrack drawing heavily on mid-20th-century popular music. The fictional backstory surrounding Frankie Giuliani and his family helped give the chain an identity very different from a conventional British family restaurant. That formula was enormously successful nationally. In 2001 there were already 61 Frankie & Benny’s restaurants, and the parent company reported strong trading and continued expansion. The following year leisure parks were identified as one of the areas on which future growth would be concentrated. Eight more Frankie & Benny’s restaurants opened during 2002 and another eleven followed in 2003.

The conditions which had driven that growth eventually became part of the chain’s difficulty. A large estate of restaurants tied to leisure and retail locations became expensive to maintain as eating habits changed and competition increased. Frankie & Benny’s expanded to more than 250 restaurants, but by the second half of the 2010s its parent company was closing weaker sites and attempting to reposition the brand. Blackpool nevertheless survived successive rounds of closures. Even the upheaval caused by the Covid-19 pandemic did not immediately end the Rigby Road restaurant. By 2021 it was also being used as a kitchen for several delivery-only brands. A contemporary account from a Blackpool delivery driver described orders being prepared from the restaurant for Frankie & Benny’s alongside Bird Box, Puddo, Devonly Pies, Kick Ass Burritos and Stacks Burgers. This reflected a wider attempt by The Restaurant Group to extract more business from its existing restaurant kitchens as home delivery became increasingly important.

Blackpool Council records show that the premises continued under TRG Leisure Limited from 28 April 2022. The final licence ran until 2 October 2023, while contemporary restaurant records reported Frankie & Benny’s as having closed during September. The available evidence therefore places its final closure in September or at the very beginning of October 2023, although an exact final trading day has not been established. Its disappearance came at a remarkable moment for Festival Leisure Park. The neighbouring Odeon closed in June 2023 when its lease expired, meaning that within a few months the cinema and the Frankie & Benny’s which had served generations of its customers had both gone. The loss of the two businesses effectively dismantled the cinema-and-restaurant combination around which much of the original leisure development had operated.

The Blackpool closure also coincided with the final retreat of The Restaurant Group from Frankie & Benny’s. In September 2023 the company agreed to dispose of its wider leisure business, dominated by Frankie & Benny’s and Chiquito, after years of restructuring and restaurant closures. The Frankie & Benny’s name survived under new ownership, but with a much smaller estate than during the chain’s peak. The Rigby Road building itself survived. Planning documents from 2023 still labelled the standalone premises as Frankie & Benny’s, while proposals for redevelopment subsequently described it as Unit 3, the former Frankie & Benny’s, with plans for a drive-through lane. A Planning Inspectorate decision in September 2024 confirmed that description.

The former restaurant remains a substantial building of approximately 3,995 square feet. Marketing particulars describe it as a standalone former Frankie & Benny’s with the potential to be divided into two smaller units, while initial work for a drive-through lane has already been carried out. The wider development has since been promoted as Bloomfield Central, with Tenpin among its occupiers and around 500 parking spaces serving the site.

Frankie & Benny’s therefore occupied an interesting place in Blackpool’s more recent leisure history. It belonged to an era when multiplex cinemas, large car parks and national restaurant chains were reshaping how families spent an evening away from the traditional attractions of the Promenade and town centre. Its closure in 2023, only months after the neighbouring Odeon, brought that particular chapter of Festival Leisure Park to an end.