Tony Macaroni, the Scotland-based Italian casual-dining chain owned by Viva Italia Group, is entering India and the United Arab Emirates in 2026 through a franchise-led expansion its partners describe as a structured three-year rollout rather than a single-market experiment. The India leg runs through a franchise partnership with Franchise India, facilitated by FranGlobal, the group’s international arm, while the brand simultaneously builds toward the UAE and the wider GCC.
Established in 2007, Tony Macaroni operates 13 restaurants across Scotland, with sites in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Hamilton, Livingston, Dunfermline and other locations. The brand sits inside Viva Italia Group, a Scottish hospitality operator, and its franchise platform cites nearly two decades of operating experience with support spanning training, marketing, operations and launch.
That profile matters. Brands crossing into Asia Pacific and MENA from a 13-unit domestic base are increasingly common, and the question serious operators ask first is whether the franchisor has codified enough of its system to transfer it. Tony Macaroni’s pitch is that it has — streamlined menus, simplified kitchen preparation and restaurant layouts designed around faster service, defined staffing levels and cost discipline.
The India partnership places one of the country’s most active franchise development platforms between the brand and prospective operators. FranGlobal, Franchise India’s international business arm, will identify and develop opportunities across multiple high-potential locations.
Tony Macaroni is now making its entry into the UAE and Indian markets.
The comment came from Gaurav Marya, Chairman of Franchise India Group, who framed the move around a structured franchise model, world-class training and a consistent guest experience as the foundation for regional scale. It is the same route Segafredo Caffè took into India through Franchise India — a pattern worth noting for brand owners weighing whether to appoint a national development partner or hunt for master franchisees directly.
Tony Macaroni’s format is built for high-volume family dining in city centres, retail parks, shopping centres and leisure destinations — pizza, pasta and Italian staples served in a relaxed setting aimed at groups, families and casual diners. That footprint logic travels well into Indian mall developments and UAE community retail, where the anchor-adjacent casual-dining box is a mature, well-understood asset class. Investors comparing this against quick-service and fast-casual economics will find the trade-offs mapped in our breakdown of QSR, fast casual and casual dining formats across Asia Pacific and MENA.
Pairing India and the UAE in a single announcement is a deliberate choice, and an instructive one. The UAE offers a compact, high-density, expatriate-heavy consumer base where a Western casual-dining brand can validate its proposition quickly and where ownership and licensing routes are comparatively straightforward — the mechanics of which we set out in our guide to franchise entry routes and ownership structures in Dubai and the UAE.
India is the harder, larger prize. Real estate cycles, supply-chain localisation, price-point calibration and state-level execution all demand a partner with feet on the ground, which is precisely what the Franchise India arrangement is meant to supply. Brand owners studying the same path will find the legal and structural groundwork covered in our analysis of how international brands enter and structure in India.
For family offices and multi-unit operators across Asia Pacific and MENA, the Tony Macaroni move is a useful data point rather than a headline deal. It shows that mid-sized European casual-dining brands — the tier below household names such as PizzaExpress — are now actively shopping for regional partners, and that they are willing to commit to three-year structured programmes rather than opportunistic one-off deals.
The opportunity in that tier is straightforward: less competition for the rights, more room to shape the market-entry plan, and a franchisor motivated to make the first international territory succeed. The corresponding demand is that the local partner supplies the operating muscle the brand does not yet have outside its home market. Operators who can credibly do both — capital plus execution — are the ones these brands are looking for, and the ones best placed to negotiate favourable development terms while the network is still small.
Tony Macaroni’s stated ambition of more than 100 locations by 2030 means the arithmetic only works if international territories carry a meaningful share of that growth. That is the window.
Tony Macaroni’s official franchise page
Source: Indian Retailer / FranchiseTV — Scotland’s Tony Macaroni Restaurants to Enter India and UAE in 2026
