Weekly Review: M Restaurant

Good food overcomes identity crisis and weird atmosphere.

Quick hit: Japanese-influenced steak spot with a focus on Wagyu.

Details: Booking essential. City. £££.
Restaurant website. More on Instagram.
Find it on Google Maps. 60 Threadneedle St, EC2R 8HG.

Sometimes, a restaurant’s own marketing gets in the way. For me, that’s very much the case with M Restaurant.

Originally launched in 2014, the opening concept included some sort of sushi bar and a grill featuring high-end Wagyu. We might say that M has a Japanese influence.

It was driven by Goucho founder Martin Williams and remains part of Rare Restaurants, which owns both brands.

After the first opening in the City, additional M locations sprung up in Victoria Street and Canary Wharf. Both have since closed. There was some sort of bar near Twickenham, also since shuttered.

Checking out the restaurant’s Instagram, it’s not hard to understand why it has struggled. The feed suggests a cool, hip, Instagram-able place with boozy, colourful cocktails that’s full of young, good-looking, fashionable people making memes for social media or shooting Tik Tok films.

But the same feed also suggests a place where you listen to lunch-time speeches from Barry Hearn and David Coulthard while considering an invitation to join the wine club.

Those two portraits are difficult to reconcile.

And they become even more so when you visit the City location — now the last one standing.

The space is huge, but only half of the ground floor is used for lunch service on a busy Thursday. The other half is a large, mostly-vacant, but quite swish bar space, although there is a guy near the back working on a laptop.

Upstairs, there’s another bar, just as empty as the one downstairs, but this one feels like a resident’s bar in a mid-tier business traveller hotel. It wants to be a more exclusive area, like the VIP section in a nightclub, but you have to pass through it to get to the toilets, so maybe not. (I was wondering whether the bars got busy in the evenings. My City-based informants tell me that they generally don’t.)

Upstairs bar at a fancy city restaurant or a mid-tier hotel?

The thing is, notwithstanding all of the empty bar areas, I like the dining space. It’s modern with banquette seating and comfortable chairs.

Dining area at M, viewed from the upstairs bar.

I also like the service. Staff were mostly knowledgeable about the menu and the wine list. They were attentive and experienced, responding well to those little queues diners emit when they want something but don’t want to wave down a server.

And I like the food.

After 10 years, the focus on Wagyu has remained, and M has a great selection.

Knowing that, I opened with something called “Laced Wagyu Dumplings.” These were fantastic. Wonderful meaty filling, perfectly fried dumpling skins, and aged soy sauce. I did ask why the dumplings were called “laced,” but the staff weren’t sure. I also tried to figure it out online. I remain none the wiser. But they didn’t seem to be laced with anything poisonous — or perhaps I’ve been building a tolerance for iocaine powder without knowing it.

Laced Wagyu Dumplings. Still not sure what they were laced with, but I survived.

For mains, it had to be steak, but not wanting to plump £100 for a hunk of Wagyu, I went for a standard ribeye, which was excellent. Accompanying Brussels sprouts were also very well done — cooked with soy sauce and other Japanese flavours until properly crispy. A really good glass of Syrah brought it all together very well.

For dessert, our waiter urged us try M’s take on a Snickers bar. It tasted very nice — playful and chocolaty and well constructed — though I do wonder if they are paying royalties to Mars.

“Snickers,” M’s signature dessert.

So far, so good.

But is it for professional lunch? Well, maybe. M has the same problem that a lot of steak-focused places have. If your companions don’t want steak, the reaction to M is likely to be “meh.” And here the atmosphere comes back into play. Because it’s a bit “meh,” as well.

On the other hand, if you’re taking someone who does like steak — and especially if you can go for big cuts of Wagyu — M can be a good choice.

And here, location comes into play. It’s absurdly convenient to lots of the tallest buildings in the square mile. You can enjoy lunch, have a coffee, and be back at your desk 5 minutes later.

So, on that basis, I’m happy to recommend it, and I would go again in the right circumstances, though I would prefer Goodman’s or Hawksmoor for steak, Sweetings or Luc’s for vibes, and Brigadiers for fun.

Thanks for reading this week’s review. M has now been added to my London Quick Reference Guide for professional eating and drinking. Please let me know what you think of M and other City places in the Comments, and please subscribe if you haven’t already.