The entrepreneur behind Los Mochis City – the Square Mile’s newest hot spot – tells Andy Silvester why here, why now.
It has been described as “summer’s hottest rooftop” and “the most anticipated restaurant opening of 2024.” Right now, Los Mochis City is also an all-hands-on-deck workshop, as table legs are sanded to size and automatic doors recalibrated.
In the middle of the Square Mile and indeed London’s most talked about new restaurant is Markus Thesleff. We’re talking just after the restaurant’s soft, soft opening, with Thesleff inviting some of the capital’s most vicious critics – his fellow restaurateurs – in to sample the offering at the new Liverpool Street venue.
A few tweaks here and there (hence the surgery on the table leg), but otherwise, Thesleff is very happy with the reception.
“People were saying they couldn’t believe we’d only been open a couple of days,” he tells me, as we sit down overlooking a spectacular Square Mile skyline.
Los Mochis City is Thesleff’s second Mexican-Japanese fusion restaurant, with the original way over the other side of town in Notting Hill. The Finnish-born, American-raised and itinerant traveller Thesleff readily admits that he didn’t know the financial district of the capital well, but the potential of the site atop 100 Liverpool Street was obvious.
“Coming out of Covid-19, I had this feeling that what we knew of the City was going to change,” he says.
“In the US, financial districts used to die out on a Friday afternoon, which was what happened here. But if you go to other parts of the world – Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai – they become lifestyle centres. And whilst I didn’t think working from home was going to stick around, I felt it was going to create change.
“So I just felt that the City was going to become much more of a seven-day-a-week destination.”
That will be music to the ears of many in the City Corporation, who have been banging the drum for Square Mile’s weekend attractions. Footfall at the weekend is already some way higher than pre-pandemic and Friday visitor numbers are also on the up as office workers enjoying a day of hybrid working are replaced by tourists and visitors. The arrival of Los Mochis – which comprises a bar, restaurant, two private dining rooms and a 3,000 square-foot rooftop terrace, with former Nobu executive chef Leonard Tanyag in the kitchen – will be another game-changer.
“I believe this area is going to become a lifestyle destination hub,” he says. That’s driven by the hospitality impressario’s view of his industry – a sector that he says is turning ever more into an “entertainment” business. He should know: the Thesleff group also operates Notting Hill’s Viajante 87 cocktail bar and the newly revitalized Knightsbridge institution Sale e Pepe, which opened afresh earlier this year.
What makes a restaurant, then, entertaining? What makes people come back? For Thesleff it’s a simple recipe.
“Our business is memories and experiences. And we have to bring happiness to people – and if when people leave us they can leave at a higher vibration, higher energy, better mood, that’s how we push positivity.”
