On a quiet stretch of Upper Grosvenor Street, between the discreet awnings of Corrigan’s and the porters of the Marriott Grosvenor House, a 156-cover Japanese restaurant has begun its first proper service. MA/NA Mayfair opened on 6 May 2026 at 30 Upper Grosvenor Street, W1K 7PH, taking over the substantial site that once housed Ruya. It is the most ambitious project yet from the Thesleff Group, the operator behind Los Mochis, LUNA Omakase, JUNO Omakase and Sale e Pepe, and it lands in old Mayfair with a deliberate, theatrical confidence. The kitchen is run by Executive Chef Leonard Tanyag, the bar by Pietro Collina, formerly of Eleven Madison Park, NoMad and Viajante87. The room itself is the work of Olya Volkova’s OV & Co, conceived as a study in 1970s Tokyo retro-glamour, with dark wood panelling, soft amber lighting and a sculptural dragon-shaped banquette winding its way through the lounge. The pricing tier is firmly upper-Mayfair, with à la carte dishes that climb steeply once Wagyu and Bluefin enter the picture. The reason to pay attention, though, is structural rather than ornamental.
The proposition is a deliberate, three-act evening: cocktails, then dinner, then a DJ-led late session, all in one space. That structure already places MA/NA in a different conversation from the area’s established Japanese names, and it shapes everything from the menu’s pacing to the dress code, which OpenTable lists as business casual. The result is a venue that wants to be a restaurant, a cocktail bar and a destination room, and it has the budget, the location and the operator track record to make a credible case for all three.
And Sets Out Its Stall As A Three-Act Evening For Mayfair Diners
MA/NA is a contemporary Japanese restaurant and cocktail bar at 30 Upper Grosvenor Street in Mayfair, W1, seating 156 across a main dining room, an open wine room, a private dining room for up to 18 guests, and a bar that turns into a DJ-led lounge after dinner.
The clearest way to read the venue is through the lens of what Mayfair already has. Japanese fine dining in W1 currently splits into two main camps. There are the long-running, technically rigorous rooms such as Umu, Sake no Hana and Nobu Berkeley St, where the focus is the food, and the late-night element is mostly civil. Then there are the volume-driven brands, including ROKA Mayfair and Hakkasan, where the energy is high, and the dining room behaves like a club from 9 pm onwards. MA/NA is consciously trying to occupy a third position, sliding between them.
On a Tuesday at 7 pm, that means a still room, generously spaced tables, and the soft, lacquered hush you would expect from a serious Mayfair restaurant. By 10 pm on a Friday, the lighting drops, the DJ takes over, and the seating around the dragon-shaped banquette becomes the most coveted real estate in the building. That is, by design, divisive. Diners who want a quiet anniversary dinner with a tasting-menu cadence will probably prefer one of the smaller omakase rooms in the area. Diners who want an evening that escalates in one location, without the awkward taxi shuffle to a second venue, are exactly the audience Markus Thesleff is targeting.
The Menu Reads As A Confident Modern Japanese À La Carte
The food at MA/NA is not omakase. It is à la carte, organised around raw, robata, tempura, ishiyaki and signature mains, and it draws on the breadth of Japanese cooking rather than any one regional school. Executive Chef Leonard Tanyag, who also oversees the kitchens at LUNA Omakase and JUNO Omakase, has framed the menu as Japanese technique read through a London lens, with British seafood and Asian sourcing meeting in dishes that are designed to share.
The opening section of the menu is the most familiar territory. There is an O-Toro Tartare built on fatty Bluefin tuna, avocado, truffle soy, kaiware, tobiko, daikon, fresh wasabi, shallot and rice crisps, presented as the room’s calling card at £39. An Avocado Aburi pairs grilled avocado with Japanese teriyaki mushrooms, asparagus, spicy aioli, spring onion and sesame for £17, and the Kurodai Carpaccio of black bream with mizuna, red onion, wafu goma dressing, black lava salt and yuzu pearls at £22 is the cleanest plate on the raw section. Masu Carpaccio of Cornish sea trout with cherry tomato, yuzu pesto, balsamic, chive and jalapeño is the most British-leaning of the cold dishes, and the most useful indicator of how the kitchen handles UK-sourced fish.
From there, the menu climbs. The robata and steak sections move from a Wagyu Kushiyaki of A5 rib kalbi with yuzu chimichurri, jalapeño sauce, coriander and shichimi at £35 through to Wagyu A5 Ishiyaki, where the fillet arrives seared on a Himalayan salt stone with garlic ponzu and Asian leaves at £90. The grilled ribeye Gyu Wasabi sits between them at £55. The headline act, however, is the steaks-by-weight section. MA/NA is one of a select number of London restaurants officially certified to serve genuine Kobe beef, sourced only from the Tajima strain of Japanese Black cattle raised in Hyōgo Prefecture under strict Japanese regulation. Kobe sirloin and ribeye are priced at £125 per 100g, with fillet at the same level, sold in 100g increments above a 200g minimum order. Japanese Wagyu A5 sirloin and ribeye sit at £63 to £69 per 100g, and Australian Wagyu MB 8–9 at £45 to £50 per 100g. The Kobe certification is genuinely meaningful and should not be confused with the broader use of the word ‘Wagyu’ on London menus.
Vegetarian and vegan diners are reasonably catered for, with Cauliflower Wasabi tempura at £15, the Avocado Aburi, a Truffle Edamame finished with seasonal fresh truffles and sesame at £11, the Yasai Gyoza of Japanese mushrooms, spinach and beansprouts at £15, and a Truffle Fried Rice built on Niigata Prefecture short-grain rice with seasonal black truffles, zenmai, garlic, onion and chive at £26 that is likely to become the kitchen’s default crowd pleaser. A practical, often overlooked detail: the entire menu is officially listed as gluten-free and made without nuts or celery, with a clearly worded note about cross-contamination from soy and sesame. Allergen and dietary requests are best flagged at the time of booking through OpenTable or directly with the team.
The Room And The Bar Programme Carry Equal Weight
The OV & Co interior is the first thing most guests will write home about. The 1970s Tokyo reference is doing real work here, with deep walnut surfaces, brushed brass, layered amber lighting and a sculptural dragon-shaped banquette that physically directs traffic from the bar to the dining tables. Overhead, a custom hand-blown Magma lighting installation by EWE Studio anchors the centre of the room. An open wine room with a sommelier station gives the more refined corner of the venue, and a more secluded private dining room sits behind it for chef-led experiences.
Service is recognisably Mayfair-paced. Tables are well spaced for the cover count, water arrives without fuss, and the sommelier team is briefed to ease guests through the sake list rather than push them towards the most expensive bottle. The wine programme runs deep on Champagne and Burgundy, but the more interesting drinking is in the sake and Japanese whisky sections, with rare bottles available by the glass for those who want to experiment without committing to a 720ml flask.
The cocktail programme is the part of MA/NA most likely to draw a crowd in its own right. Pietro Collina has built the menu around three pillars he describes as precision, heat and rhythm, drawing on Japanese bartending technique and the same 1970s Tokyo aesthetic as the room. The Noble Martini combines Grey Goose Altius vodka, dry Vermouth, Château d’Yquem and a lemon twist. The Goya Sour layers Haku vodka, Yuntaku Japanese amaro, pineapple, peach and passion fruit. The Bamboo Piña Colada uses Bacardi Ocho with pineapple, charred coconut cream and Panda. Cocktails sit in the upper teens to mid-twenties per drink, which is in line with the Mayfair average for this calibre of bar.
Noise levels shift across the evening. From opening through to about 9.30 pm, the room reads as a serious restaurant, and conversation across a table for four is comfortable. After 10 pm, a resident DJ programme lifts the volume noticeably, and tables that suit a quiet conversation become harder to find. Booking earlier sittings is the practical answer for diners who want the food to be the point of the evening.
Fun fact: Although MA/NA seats 156 diners across its main room, the venue is configured to host stand-up parties for up to 300 guests, almost double its seated capacity, which positions it as one of the few high-end Japanese rooms in W1 capable of taking on a serious private event of that scale.
Context From The Thesleff Group And How MA/NA Sits In Mayfair
MA/NA is the most expensive and most exposed launch the Thesleff Group has attempted in London. The operator’s track record matters here. Markus Thesleff built Los Mochis from a single Notting Hill room into a two-site operation that now includes a busy City venue, took LUNA Omakase and JUNO Omakase into the increasingly crowded London omakase scene, and oversaw OKKU Dubai and Pangaea Nightclub at an international level. The DNA of the group is hospitality engineered as a system, with strong design, scalable concepts and bar programmes that earn their own following. MA/NA folds all of those competencies into a single roof on a Mayfair freehold.
The site itself carries history. Number 30 Upper Grosvenor Street was the long-running home of Ruya, the upscale Anatolian restaurant that closed in late 2024, and the bones of the room are well suited to a 156-cover operation. Next door sits Corrigan’s Mayfair, one of the area’s longest-serving fine-dining rooms, which gives MA/NA a useful, if quiet, neighbour effect. The site is a short walk from Marble Arch and Bond Street stations, less than 5 minutes on foot from Park Lane, and around 8 minutes from Selfridges. For corporate guests staying at the Marriott Grosvenor House or The Connaught, MA/NA is comfortably within walking distance, which matters more for late-night service than the marketing tends to admit.
Within the local Japanese cluster, MA/NA is most directly comparable to ROKA Mayfair on Charlotte Street’s Mayfair sibling positioning, and to Sake no Hana for ambition of room and price ceiling. It is not trying to compete with the rigour of Umu or with the counter-led intimacy of Endo at The Rotunda. Its closest spiritual neighbour is probably Sexy Fish in Berkeley Square, in that both rooms blur the boundary between high-end Japanese dining and a serious bar programme. MA/NA reads as the more grown-up of the two, but the comparison is fair, and prospective bookers should weigh which side of that line they want to fall on.
The trade-offs are real. Diners chasing the most quietly precise Japanese cooking in W1 will still be better served by a smaller omakase counter. Diners on a tighter budget will find the menu unforgiving once the Wagyu and Kobe sections open up, with mains that can clear three-figure prices per portion. Service is polished but new, and a few of the running rhythms a 156-cover operation needs to settle were still finding their footing in the soft-launch period before the 6 May full opening.
Practical Booking Advice And Who MA/NA Mayfair Is Right For
Reservations are taken through OpenTable and directly on the MA/NA website, with the team reachable on 020 7362 0080 for private dining and group enquiries. The kitchen is dinner-only, with service running from 5 pm to 1:30 am Monday through Saturday and from 5 pm to 12:30 am on Sunday, which already signals the operator’s intent to lean on the late-night transition. Bookings opened in mid-April 2026 and ran heavily through the launch week, so the most realistic strategy in the first month of trading is to look at midweek tables at the earlier 6 pm or 6.30 pm slots, or after 10 pm if the late-night atmosphere is the draw. Friday and Saturday prime sittings are likely to be held back for repeat guests and group enquiries, in line with the broader pattern across high-profile Mayfair openings.
On price positioning, the à la carte structure means the spend per head is more elastic than at a tasting menu venue. A pragmatic dinner of 2 small plates, 1 robata or large plate, a side and a couple of cocktails will sit in the £110 to £140 per head range before service. A celebration meal that includes the £39 O-Toro Tartare, the £90 Wagyu A5 Ishiyaki or the Kobe selection at £125 per 100g, with premium sake or cocktails, is realistically a £200 to £300 per head exercise. A discretionary 15% service charge is added to all bills. There is no lunch service and no fixed-price set menu, with all pricing à la carte from 5 pm onwards, so guests looking for a daytime fine-dining option will need to look elsewhere in the area.
Occasion fit is straightforward. MA/NA suits a stylish business dinner where the host needs both food quality and a room that signals seriousness, a celebratory dinner that is meant to roll into late drinks without leaving the building, a corporate group of up to 18 in the private dining room, and a couple wanting a cocktails-first evening with a serious dinner attached. It is not the right room for a hushed first date, a child-friendly Sunday, or a value lunch. For wheelchair access and any specific dietary requirements, calling ahead is sensible.
MA/NA Mayfair Reads As A Confident New Anchor For Late-Night Japanese Dining
On the evidence of its opening week, MA/NA Mayfair is the most fully realised expression of the Thesleff Group’s thinking to date, and a serious new entry in the upper tier of London’s Japanese dining scene. The cooking is precise without being austere, the bar programme is good enough to draw its own crowd, and the room is one of the more confident pieces of restaurant design London has seen this year. It is not the cheapest, the quietest or the most rigorous Japanese venue in W1, and it does not need to be. The right occasion is a long evening that wants to move through gears in one space. Order the O-Toro Tartare to start, the Wagyu Ishiyaki for the table, and book early enough that you can still hear yourself think over the first course. Walking into MA/NA Mayfair from a wet Grosvenor Street pavement feels like stepping into a Tokyo basement bar at midnight, with a serious modern Japanese restaurant attached.
