Cave 27 sounds more like a wine shop but here is certainly the smallest izakaya of Paris, a venue which could also pretend to the category of tachinomi because it's mostly a standing bar serving sake, wine and
B. and I went there with a Japanese friend, and with a fourth person in the room the place seemed almost full, but we had a very good time, both with the food and the sake.
Cave 27 is located at 27 rue Lamarcq on a quiet stretch of street of Montmartre, and most tourists don't even know this spot 20 meters away with this striking view on the church on top (picture at bottom).
One of the reasons you might want to visit is Cave 27 is also because the maître des lieux, Takemoto-san, has more in his background than just setting up an izakaya in Paris. What do we start with ? Flamenco, equestrian art, mangas, arab language, hunting horn, fencing ? Motoichi Takemoto, who prefers to be called Athos Takemoto is an expert on all these fields, he travelled extensively, having for example spent 3 years in Algeria recently where he worked as an interpreter for a Japanese contruction company, after having spent now and then time in Australia, Switzerland, Tunisia and Syria, beyond Japan of course where he was born in Tokyo...
speaking of the manga culture which is now so ubiquitous in the West, I found out through research that Takemoto-san was the first to publish in the late 70s', from Switzerland and with the help of publisher Rolf Kesseling, a manga magazine named Le Cri qui Tue where you could find French translations of mangas by authors like Takao Saitō, Osamu Tezuka, Yoshihiro Tatsumi & Fujio Akatsuka, and Shōtarō Ishinomori. The first issue was published in 1978 but the venture was short-lived and stopped in 1981 after the dive of the French Franc. Takemoto-san was a precursor in the spread of this manga culture, more years were needed before the seeds could blossom, and manga fanatics in France owe much to his pioneering work.





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