Review: Margo, Glasgow

Richard Bath road tests the new restaurant from the team behind Ka Pao and Ox & Finch, and comes away deeply impressed.

When I heard that Scoop Restaurants, the team behind the outstanding Ka Pao and one of my most reliable go-to restaurants in Glasgow, Ox & Finch, were launching a new city centre restaurant, I was first in line to try it. I wasn’t disappointed.

Margo channels many of the elements which have made Scoop’s existing restaurants both critical success (both hold Michelin Bib Gourmands) and hugely popular with Glasgow diners.

When it comes to ambience and décor, Margo lives up to founder Jonathan MacDonald’s promise that it will be ‘relaxed, accessible and fun, alongside a focus on quality’.

A 138-cover restaurant on two floors and built around a long bar, when we visited in midweek the place had the sort of noisy hubbub you expect on a busy Saturday nights. When I mentioned this to our server, she just laughed: ‘Come back on a Saturday night,’ she said, ‘it gets crazy in here…’

Focaccia to start.

Yet somehow this cavernous space feels genuinely intimate. Many of the tables feature banquettes and booths, and with salvaged light fittings and traditional clay render there’s a strong element of industrial design about the décor (a la Timberyard).

An open kitchen with counter seating so you can watch head chef Robin Aitken and his team at work allows diners to peer under the hood at a brigade which does everything from make its own pasta and bread to even undertaking some of the in-house butchery.

But ultimately, every restaurant lives and dies by its food, and as with Ka Pao and Ox & Finch, this is the strongest element of what their new sibling has to offer. Virtually every new opening these days seems to plump for a tasting menu or small plates, and at Margo they’ve gone for the latter.

Croquettes filled with ham hough, smoked paprika and guindilla chilli.

Chipsticks with taramaslata

The menu is broken down into four sections and we were advised to choose between two to three dishes from each. As we waited for the food we had a couple of cocktails (I can recommend the amaretto and amaro sour), and then we started off with four succulent slabs of focaccia with a Kalamata olive tapenade (£5), four chipsticks – a kind of massive chip made from grated potato – with taramaslata, which was a glorious surprise (£6) and croquettes filled with ham hough, smoked paprika and guindilla chilli (£4), which rounded off a superb introduction to the sort of innovative, easy-eating food I adore.

The conveyor belt of excellent dishes was now in full flow. Next up was beef tartare with grilled onion salad, crispy potato and crème fraiche (£9.75), which was a really interesting dish but disappointingly short on the beef. The plate of super-tender and thinly sliced cold roast lamb, topped with a black garlic and saag paste (£9.50) was a joy, as was an unfeasibly moist, if smallish, slice of crab tart topped with crab meat (£11.75).

Our next dish was my personal favourite. You don’t see lamb faggots on many menus these days, but served with bonnet polenta and salsa verde (£11), this was an utterly memorable dish of intense flavours and delicious textures. Well-cooked but more run of the mill was the bavette steak with chimichurri (£14), one of the few dishes we probably wouldn’t order next time out. We also ordered two decent side dishes in a nice Waldorf salad (£7.50) and plate of spinach with boursin (£4.50).

Lamb faggot

We rounded off with three puddings: an excellent lemon and sorrel posset which avoided the usual pitfall of too much lemon, a well-executed if slightly dry brown butter almond tart with poached quince and crème fraiche, and a figtastic special which was comfortably the least impressive of the  three puddings (£6 each).

If I have one gripe – and this is the smallest of quibbles in what was otherwise an outstanding experience – it’s with the long, globally wide-ranging and sensibly priced wine list. If those are virtues, unfortunately virtually no description is given of the wines, including whether they meet the new trend for natural, biodynamic, low-sulphite and organic wines, which can result in a cloudy wine with a distinctly different character from that which the diners expected.

I’d hate to end on a flat note though, because Margo was brilliant, and consistently hit the high notes throughout.

Margo, 68 Miller Street, Glasgow G1 1DT.

Read more Reviews here.

Subscribe to read the latest issue of Scottish Field.