Wright Brothers opens an oyster restaurant in Covent Garden
Ben Wright and Robin Hancock's seafood group takes over the former Margot site on 28 November with Mediterranean-leaning oysters, crab and whelks.
Wright Brothers, the UK seafood group, opens its fifth London restaurant in Covent Garden on 28 November, taking over the site of the shuttered Italian restaurant Margot.
The new restaurant keeps the group's name and its focus on oysters and shellfish, but leans further into the Mediterranean than its other sites. The menu, overseen by Kevin Gratton, previously of Samphire and Sage in York and Scott's Mayfair, draws on the founders' travels across southern Europe.
A fifth site built on wholesale roots
A tobacco factory turned oyster room, stocked by the same boats that built the business twenty years ago.
Ben Wright and Robin Hancock started Wright Brothers in 2002 as a seafood wholesale business before opening their first restaurant in Borough Market in 2005. The group later added sites in South Kensington and at Battersea Power Station, while still running wholesale depots at Billingsgate Market in London and in Brixham, Devon, which supply the restaurants directly.
Margot, an Italian restaurant, closed on the Great Queen Street site in June 2025 after nine years of trading. PNW Studio has reworked the space with teal leather banquettes, café curtains and a scallop-tiled bar, inside what was once a tobacco factory.
What's on the menu
Head chef Jaspal Flora, formerly of 45 Jermyn Street, will serve butter-grilled oysters with black winter truffle, blue belly shrimp with citrus and jalapeño, and fruits de mer platters with whole Devon crab, Atlantic prawns, clams, mussels and whelks. Oysters, sourced from the UK, Ireland and France, also turn up as a gelato topped with olives and caviar.
“Exceptional produce, trusted relationships and a love for bringing people together” is how Wright and Hancock describe the business. Covent Garden has drawn a wave of new restaurants this autumn, and Wright Brothers is betting its wholesale supply chain gives it an edge over newer arrivals.
The Wright Brothers Covent Garden opening lands as the UK oyster trade tightens its standards. French growers have been pushing restaurants to grade oysters by size and origin rather than guess, a shift the group's own buyers at Billingsgate and Brixham already follow when they stock the five restaurants.
