Thesleff Group opened MA/NA on Wednesday 6 May, taking the Grosvenor Square space previously occupied by Turkish restaurant Rüya and pivoting it into what the group is positioning as a vibe-led but high-end Japanese restaurant. The launch is the most prominent of the group's London moves to date and slots into a category — top-tier Japanese dining in Mayfair and the surrounding postcodes — that has continued to attract capital even as parts of the wider London restaurant market have softened.
Reading the site choice
The Grosvenor Square site sits in one of London's most fiercely contested fine-dining catchments, with the high-end Japanese segment in particular crowded by long-established operators including Roka, Zuma, Nobu, the various Park Chinois-adjacent concepts, and a wave of more recently established names that have arrived since 2022. The bar for distinctiveness in this category is unusually high; operators succeeding in it have tended to differentiate either through narrowly defined product specialism — sushi-only counters, omakase-only formats, regional Japanese cuisine focuses — or through atmosphere and service design that creates a different occasion type from the established competitive set.
Thesleff Group's positioning of MA/NA as "vibey yet high-end" suggests the latter approach: a venue intended to compete on energy and occasion rather than purely on ingredient-led credibility. The Rüya space itself was originally designed with a high-impact aesthetic, and the conversion appears to have leaned into rather than away from that physical inheritance.
The category economics
The high-end Japanese segment in London has been one of the few parts of the restaurant market where average spend per cover has continued to rise meaningfully in real terms through 2024 and 2025. Operators in the category have generally maintained margin recovery faster than the broader restaurant industry, helped by relatively limited price sensitivity at the top of the customer base and by the fact that several of the highest-margin product lines — premium sake and shochu, high-end raw fish preparations, A5 wagyu and equivalent — sit in categories where consumers expect significant pricing.
The competitive risk for new entrants is volume rather than spend per head. London's resident customer base for this type of restaurant is finite, and inbound leisure demand — which has firmed across 2025 — is the swing factor that determines whether a new opening fills its diary or runs at the kind of mid-week occupancy that breaks the unit economics.
Wider context for the May pipeline
MA/NA is part of an unusually heavy May 2026 opening slate in London. Gordon Ramsay Restaurants marked its 100th worldwide opening with Bread Street Kitchen & Bar at 22 Bishopsgate; Aktar Islam of Birmingham's Opheem opened his London debut Oudh 1722 in Borough, focused on Awadhi cuisine; JKS-backed Arcade confirmed its third London site in the former TGI Friday's space in Covent Garden; and Monica Galetti has returned to operating in London via the social-enterprise restaurant 130 Primrose. Smaller independents including Luca Meola's Rossella in Muswell Hill and Nikita Pathakji's Maai in Clapham have also opened or are imminent.
The composition of that opening slate is itself notable. It is dominated by chef-led, group-backed, and food-hall-format launches at the higher end of the market, in stark contrast to the closure picture at the wet-led community end of the trade. London continues to absorb a disproportionate share of the year's openings, and the geographical concentration of capital deployment in the capital — and within the capital, in a relatively small number of prime postcodes — remains a structural feature that anyone modelling regional rollout assumptions through 2026 and 2027 should bear in mind.
What to look for in the first eight weeks
Restaurant openings of this profile are typically judged on three things in their first two months: whether they secure positive critical reception in the major broadsheet and digital trade reviews, whether the diary holds beyond the initial PR-driven peak through the soft second month, and whether the menu and service settle quickly enough to permit operational consistency. Thesleff Group has signalled it expects MA/NA to be a long-term operation rather than a turnover project, which suggests the more relevant near-term test is whether the trading rhythm establishes itself by the end of June.