EXCLUSIVE: Maison Kitsuné Debuts First Restaurant

PARIS — In its five years of existence, the Café Kitsuné Palais-Royal, a coffee shop opened by Franco-Japanese fashion brand Maison Kitsuné in the Palais-Royal garden, has pretty much become a Parisian monument. “Tourists stop by to take pictures like they would for the Mona Lisa,” joked the brand’s cofounder Gildas Loaëc, speaking at the headquarters a couple of streets away. Kidding aside, with more than 77,000 mentions on Instagram, including countless pictures of fox-shaped biscuits — “kitsune” is the Japanese word for fox — and perfect matcha lattes, branching into the café business was an undeniable image boost for the brand. Maison Kitsuné, which began as a music label in 2002 before adding a ready-to-wear line in 2005, now counts five coffee shops around the world, including spots in Seoul, operated in partnership with Samsung, and Tokyo, with future Café Kitsuné openings scheduled for London, New York, Shanghai and Jakarta before the end of the year. But the brand chose Paris, where it all started, for the first chapter of its latest adventure: The opening of the very first Café Kitsuné restaurant, taking over a 1,720-square-foot former travel agency on the Place André Malraux, a quaint Parisian square between the Opera and the

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