Team behind trio of Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurants to open Margo

The Michelin Bib Gourmand-winning team behind Ka Pao, Ox and Finch in Scotland will be opening a new restaurant in Glasgow this September.

Scoop Restaurants Group’s Margo will be led by Glasgow native and chef Robin Aitken, who first joined the team in 2014, with Paige Wilson, who has been with the group since 2019, on front of house.

Aitken secured Ka Pao in Edinburgh’s first Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2022 and was involved in retaining Ox and Finch’s equivalents for the past decade.  

At Margo he will offer a menu of snacks, small plates and sharing dishes with a nod to seasonal Scottish produce. The focus will be on seafood, meat butchered in-house and bread and pasta made from scratch.

Dishes are set to include smoked haddock churros with Manchego and saffron; beef tartare, grilled onion salad, crispy potato and crème fraîche; skate wing with kumquat kosho, trout roe and green peppercorns; and blackberry and fennel meringue and chocolate nemesis.

The cocktail and wine list will offer a mix of classic and contemporary drinks.

Margo will seat 138 diners across its main dining room and upper mezzanine. The space will feature a large open kitchen, counter seating, clay renderings and ceramic and terracotta tiles, all conceived by Mosaic Architecture and Design.

Jonathan MacDonald, managing director of Scoop Restaurants Group, said: “Margo will be an evolution of our first restaurant, Ox and Finch, which has just celebrated its 10th birthday.

“Whilst retaining lots of the features that have made Ox and Finch so popular for the last decade, Margo will be bigger and bolder. We’ll be pushing things further in the kitchen, baking our own breads, making fresh pastas and also doing some in-house butchery.”

He added: “We’re very excited to be able to share what we’ve been working on with Glasgow, and we’ve also got some exciting plans coming up for Ox and Finch later in the year.”