Nashville seems an unlikely place to discover anything even remotely akin to a Japanese kissa bar. A kissa—or, more traditionally, a jazz kissa—is a type of café that initially sprang up in Japan in the 1920s as a communal place for people to drink, socialize, and listen to vinyl records. “They’re typically very intimate, casual, DIY spaces, sort of cobbled together,” explains Roman Alonso of the AD100 firm 

, which recently completed work on 888, a combination kissa and sushi restaurant improbably tucked in the base of the JW Marriott Nashville hotel tower. The brainchild of Harrison Soffer, a principal at the hospitality and real estate development firm Turnberry, 888 celebrates the spirit of the kissa along with the fertile design heritage of the country in which it originated.