The London seafood group opens at 45 Great Queen Street on November 28, restoring its portfolio to four restaurants on the former Margot site.
Wright Brothers, the family-run seafood business founded by Ben Wright and Robin Hancock in 2002, opens a fourth London restaurant on November 28. The new room is at 45 Great Queen Street in Covent Garden, the former home of the Italian restaurant Margot, and it returns the group to four sites alongside Borough Market, Battersea Power Station and South Kensington.
The address carries two pasts. Before Margot, the building at the junction of Great Queen Street and Drury Lane was a tobacco factory. Margot traded there for nine years before closing in June 2025, and the site has stood empty since. Wright Brothers takes it on as the largest kind of statement a seafood group can make in the West End: a full restaurant built around its own wholesale catch.
The order of the business matters. Wright and Hancock began as oyster merchants, and the wholesale operation, Wright Brothers Wholesale, still supplies fish and shellfish to restaurants across the country. The restaurants grew out of the supply business rather than the other way round, which is why the group's own description of its rooms starts with freshness of product before style. The Covent Garden kitchen will cook from that same wholesale supply.
The group is already hiring for the opening through its own recruitment pages, including a sommelier charged with shaping the wine programme from the first day, a sign of the scale intended. The same pages note the Wright Brothers Sea Change Foundation, established in 2024 to support ocean protection and coastal communities, the wholesale business putting a formal structure behind the sourcing story it sells.
The menu, overseen by Kevin Gratton, previously of Scott's in Mayfair and Samphire and Sage in York, with head chef Jaspal Flora joining from 45 Jermyn Street, leans Mediterranean in seasoning while staying British and European in its fish. Announced dishes include oysters grilled in butter with black winter truffle, blue belly shrimps with citrus fruits and jalapeno, a winter leaf salad with bottarga, shaved pecorino and pine nuts, and cuttlefish braised in its own ink with sea aster.
The centrepiece is the fruits de mer platter: whole Devon crab, Atlantic prawns, clams, mussels and whelks, served alongside the group's oysters from beds in the United Kingdom, Ireland and France. Dessert goes back to the oyster for its idea, an oyster gelato finished with olive oil and caviar, the kind of dish that only a house this committed to a single ingredient would attempt to sell.
Inside, the announced design runs to teal leather banquettes, dark wood panelling and cafe curtains, with a scallop-tiled bar and a seafood display at the back of the space and high counter seating in front of it. It is a brasserie grammar rather than a tasting-menu one: a room designed for platters, cold fish and long lunches, in a district that runs on theatre times.
The existing rooms show the range the group works in. Borough Market is the original, described by the house as intimate and informal; Battersea Power Station is a sleek riverside restaurant; South Kensington is the local near the museums. Across all three, the signature offer is the same, oysters at a pound each at set times, the promotion that built the name. Covent Garden, by the announced design and menu, is the grandest version of the formula.
A fourth site restores numbers the group had before, but the choice of the Margot site is the real decision. Covent Garden gives a seafood house a West End room with a dining history, on a street that feeds the theatres, at a scale its market and power-station rooms do not attempt. The risk is equally clear: a large West End site, vacant for 17 months, in the toughest trading climate London restaurants have known.
The group's protection is vertical. A restaurant that owns its supply chain buys its fish differently from a restaurant that phones an order in, and an oyster merchant opening an oyster restaurant starts with the product already paid for. Wright Brothers opens on November 28 with that advantage, a menu that travels the Mediterranean without leaving its own cold stores, and a dessert that will either become a signature or a dare. Either way, it will be talked about, which in Covent Garden is half the business.
Filed from the Tables desk.
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