On July 18, the commercial chamber of the High Court of Thionville ordered the compulsory liquidation of the L’Excelsior café, located at Place Claude-Arnoult. Its manager, Dominique Remy, however benefited from a safeguard plan which followed a judicial recovery proposed since August 30 … 2012 by the same commercial chamber. Which therefore decided this summer to end the plan for sufficiently substantial economic reasons. And to decide on its compulsory liquidation with immediate effect.
Dominique, assisted by his counsel Me Pierre Amadori, had initially appealed to the president of the court of appeal for the provisional lifting of the liquidation – which would have allowed him to open again – before the judgment on appeal on the merits. This request for suspension having finally been rejected, it is now very unlikely or even impossible for the liquidation to be contradicted.
The owners of the walls and the goodwill have in any case enough certainty in this sense to have started this week a vast operation of clearing of the buildings. The good news – because there is one – is that donors have said they want to continue the beverage business. It remains to find a new manager, but we do not really worry.
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An institution
The place is an institution, with its sun-drenched terrace magnified by the majesty of lime trees. A place that sublimates friendship and mix of genres. Where pigeons do it only at their head (and not at their head elsewhere!). A kind of village in the city. The unmissable event for draft beer lovers, bon vivant, lawyers, workers, students, musicos, comedians and “scene-at-barists”. Some have even seen journalists from the neighboring building carrying out interviews around a good Chouffe.
That Excel Excel has been experienced by all the regulars of this melting pot as a disaster as dramatic as the fire of Notre-Dame de Paris. It was their chapel. Modest certainly, freezing in winter and boiling in summer, but at least they felt at home.
Of course, it is highly desirable for the dynamism of the city that the establishment reopens in a more or less close time, with a new team, a new dynamic. But the spirit of generosity, camaraderie and frank decoyade instilled by the friend Dom and relayed by the faithful Cathy, Sam and the others will have disappeared, him, forever.
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