If a trendy, mood-lit experimental Japanese restaurant and jazz bar was going to pop up somewhere, we’d have put our money on it appearing in Dalston - this edgy corner of the capital has turned into a hotbed of culinary talent in recent years after all. It’s easy to walk past the restaurant itself - its only signifier is a scrawl of graffiti over the windows.
We’d recommend you don’t (walk past it, that is) - instead, push your way through the solid wood door and enter a quite beautiful space. A long bar stretches off into the dining room, lit by the gentle glow of spherical pendants, which hang like orbiting planets in the sky. Further into the dining room, a skylight bathes the far reaches of the room in natural light, highlighting crevasses in the exposed brick. It’s a truly stunning space that embraces organic, natural lines - considered, but without feeling over-designed.
The menu is a little more complex, taking Asian flavours and mixing in some closer-to-home European formats and techniques. Mostly that lands, as in a beef tartare, where we squeeze spoons of soy-flecked raw beef into sheets of nori, like a Japanese tartare taco. It’s an excellent little snack, as is a bowl of tempura-laced popcorn shrimp with spicy mayo.
The menu does trend towards big flavours - there’s lots of soy, miso, nori and umami at play here. The best dishes manage to contrast that with something fresh, for example, a gorgeous miso-glazed tranche of black cod, gently charred on the robatayaki grill and served with a mound of marinated red cabbage.
Mu does occasionally get a little clever for its own good - a nori-infused creme brulee doesn’t really work for us (subjectively perhaps), and the nori fries are little more than a decent chip. Still, the highs easily outnumber the lows, and when you throw in excellent cocktails, a very good wine list and the opportunity to see some star musicians (Dele Sosimi has appeared here recently), Mu is certainly worth a visit.