By Gordon Davidson
Jonathan MacDonald makes a confession that may horrify the business-minded – when considering a new venture, his first thought is not ‘will it be profitable?’ but ‘will it be fun?’
“I can’t bring myself to do something that I don’t find fun,” said the Scoop Restaurant Group boss. “Obviously we look at numbers, we cost things properly, we need to make a gross profit margin – but that’s never really what comes first.
“What comes first is ‘what would be cool here? What would be fun? What would resonate with people? What do the team feel like doing? What can we get excited about?”
There is no denying that letting his heart lead the way is working for MacDonald, as the winner of SLTN’s 2025 Entrepreneur of the Year Award has accrued ample evidence of success – when SLTN went to meet him, the news had just broken that Scoop’s latest venue, Sebb’s in Glasgow’s Miller St, had been awarded a Michelin Bib Gourmand, a scant year since opening.
Technically, this brought Scoop’s tally of Michelin Bibs to four, alongside the group’s debut venue, Ox & Finch; its radically different second venue, Ka Pao; and its more recent Margo, the upstairs neighbour to Sebb’s.
However, as our interview happened betwixt the advance notice of Sebb’s award, but before the formal Michelin ceremony, Jonathan refused to ‘count his chickens’ in case Michelin’s judges decided to give with one hand while taking with the other.
They didn’t, and Scoop is indeed now the holder of four Bibs, notably the most Michelin plaudits currently held by a single Scottish operator.
So was Scoop’s variation in venue styles baked in from the start?
“We don’t really want to cookie-cutter out the same thing. It just gets a bit boring, apart from anything else,” said Jonathan.
“I think one of the things that is nice about all our places is that they were designed around us going in and getting a feel for what the space could be – the physical space and location sort of informs what they become.
“Even with Sebb’s, there’s a few of those kind of basements around about the city centre, but very few of them are activated.
“So it was quite a gut decision to go ahead, because if you were going to look at a cost plan, and say to an accountant, ‘we want to knock a big hole in the floor, we want to put in structural steel, and we want to get a specialist company in to spray the lead paint off this brick arch’, you could easily make a logical business case that the idea doesn’t stack up.
“But if you look at it as a really cool space that deserves to be something, with a really cool bar at one end and decks at the other, then you can make an emotional case that makes total sense.”
Jonathan is by no means reckless – in comparison to some of his hospitality peers, he is quietly spoken and convincingly self-effacing – but he recognises the business value of taking a calculated risk based on instinct.
“Of course you look for something that is going to be successful; but I think if you get something that you are going to be excited about, that the team are going to be excited about… the enjoyment of what we do comes from the reflected thanks of customers’ enjoyment.
“If you get those things right, the numbers should really look after themselves. As long as you are costing things properly and not making any wild financial decisions.”
While Sebb’s has been in the headlines, Scoop’s ground zero, Ox & Finch has been quietly settling back into its groove after a brief closure for renovation.
“That’s been going great,” he reports. “It has always been busy and popular, but I think making the outside a wee bit more desirable was worthwhile. We never did much with Sauchiehall St because it is not the most picturesque, sat behind the bus stop, but having the awnings and planters makes it a nice wee desirable spot to sit.
“We had a relatively good summer, because that makes a huge difference to the covers. The thing with Ox & Finch, it could do with being bigger. The bigger places can really make hay on a Friday or Saturday when the demand is there.
“Ox & Finch is always pretty full, but it tops out – if there was more space we could fill it.
“But it’s so established now – having done the refurb sort of cements it. It sounds silly because it is obviously part of a tenement, but Mosaic did a great job making it more tenement-y, with the dark green, it’s got a real feeling of always having been there.”
That grounded vibe is fitting, as Ox & Finch is very much the seed-bed from which the Scoop Group has organically grown.
“All our senior positions really are people that have worked with us for a long time and have been promoted up through the company,” he said. “Each time we’ve done something that’s the way it’s developed. Pretty much all our senior chef team are from the original Ox & Finch kitchen team.”
He listed the Group’s lifers: “Sandy who is Chef Director was Chef de Partie in Ox & Finch; Daniel who’s another Director was the original Head Chef there; Bobby and Aurelien who are in here [the interview was conducted in Margo] started off as Chef de Parties in Ox & Finch, 10 or 11 years ago; so did Danny who is Head Chef downstairs now; and our Ka Pao head chefs, Ashley in Glasgow and Tomin Edinburgh, both joined Ka Pao Glasgow at the beginning in Chef de Partie positions.
“It’s the same front of house – the people who are managing our places started off waiting at Ox & Finch.”
Does this close-knit familiarity amongst Scoop veterans help or hinder the business of onboarding new staff?
“We have a bit of a deep dive induction for new folk,” explained Jonathan, “but there’s a cultural thing around it as well.
“Its self-policing in a way, because once you’ve got a lot of people who are established here for a long time, they’ve really bought in and really care about it. Everyone is quite quick in speaking up if they think anyone is letting the side down, which is good.
“But we try to have a really positive, encouraging culture, so it’s never like anybody is getting degraded because they’re not doing a good job, they’re just getting shown a better way to do it,” he stressed.
“Generally, the vast majority of people buy in, and enjoy it. The feedback we get a lot from teams is that it’s nice working for a place where you are not hearing a lot of complaints, or fighting with the kitchen because you have to take something back and the kitchen disagree with the customer and all that sort of stuff that sometimes goes on in restaurants.
“We’ve got a senior team that is really customer first, and has pride in the product. It’s customer first and team first because you can’t really separate the two.”
In keeping with its staff retention, Scoop Group has a regular band of designers and tradesmen that are simpatico with its standards and expectations.
Looking around Margo, Jonathan credits interior designer Stuart Black for the timeless look: “He’s a good mate, and we have a really good understanding of each other.
“Together, we just try to make it better each time. We spent way more here than at O&F. Obviously with inflation each one gets more expensive, but also making conscious decisions of saying, right we really want this to last, so put in a one-piece cooking suite instead of modular appliances.”
All the furniture in Margo is bespoke, designed by Black with what Jonathan describes as a ‘kind of Bahausy-vibe’, most notably Margo’s chairs, which were then manufactured by a chap called Andy Macdonald (no relation) in a wee fabrication workshop over in Govan.
“Design is important for the look, but we are making stuff that is practical too. Like those bespoke chairs. They are solid, Clyde built. You realise after years of running busy places, what a total doing stuff takes. So you look around and ask ‘what are the first things to go?’ ‘what are the weak points?’, and you see the sense in spending a bit more on chairs.”
I note that the minimalist German vibe is somewhat undermined by the fact that all the chairs appear to be wearing knitted baby bootees…
“They do,” Jonathan conceded. “They were making a grinding noise against the floor and the vibration was travelling through the building. So we got the socks off Amazon to fix that.”
Turning to Scoop’s plans for the future, Jonathan is giving nothing away beyond mentioning a ‘couple of wee things in the pipeline’.
“Getting back to it, anything we do again, it needs to have a point of difference, so we are not repeating ourselves.”
Of course Scoop could opt to ‘pump out another six Ox & Finches’, with menus handed down from above to staff that are cooking by numbers, but that’s just not the way Jonathan thinks.
“Sure, I’m involved in menus, but I’m not dominant. I think one of the keys to our success is those guys [the group’s chef teams] have a lot of autonomy.
“It’s what they and their team come up with and want to put on the menu. You can’t replicate that from a centralised development kitchen… or worse, a centralised production kitchen.
“In each place, it comes from the heart.”
