MA/NA Opens in Mayfair as the Los Mochis Group's Fourth Room

The wood arrives first, dark and unbroken, before a single dish does. Amber light falls across it in a wash calibrated for skin and glassware alike, the kind more often specified for a stage than a dining room. Nothing about the room asks to be explained. MA/NA, the new restaurant-bar that has opened in Mayfair, leads with both and leaves the guest to work out the rest.

The effect is theatrical rather than domestic. A room lit like this is not built to be lived in; it is built to be watched, and it recruits everyone seated inside it into that audience, whether or not they ordered a seat with a view of the bar or of the room beyond it. Conversation in a space staged this deliberately competes with the lighting for attention, and it does not always win.

That the room reads as staged rather than accidental has everything to do with who built it, because MA/NA belongs to the group already running Los Mochis, LUNA Omakase and Juno Omakase, and the businessman behind all four, Markus Thesleff, is by now less a restaurateur opening venues than a producer casting them, each with its own name and its own palette but staged by a hand whose real material is atmosphere, decided at the level of the wall panel and the lamp before anyone has decided what to serve on the plate beneath them, which is a kind of authorship that has nothing to do with a stove and everything to do with a lighting plot, the discipline of someone who treats an opening the way a director treats a first night, with the room fully blocked before the script is finished.

What a diner carries out of MA/NA is not a taste. It is the afterglow of amber on dark wood, the sense of having sat inside someone else's carefully blocked scene, still visible, in a way, on the pavement half an hour later, the way a stage light stays printed on the eye long after the curtain has dropped and the doors have opened onto an ordinary street.