December 31, 2018–It's nearly 2019, and time to starting thinking again about The Boat Race(s), Men's and Women's, in the early afternoon of 7 April 2019.The Women's Race will be at 2:15 pm and the Men's Race at 3:15 pm. I plan to be in Oxford or London that day.
The Boat Race Dinner in New York City will be on April 25, so it is time also to think about getting a Rowing Blazer (the required dress for men is Black Tie or Boat Club Blazer). I rowed in the Second Eight for Trinity Oxford in 1963 and 1964 and have stayed in touch with the Trinity Boat Club, so a Trinity blazer would be nice to have.
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| Hours of Rowing Blazers, except holidays. |
So a few days ago I tried to look at the blazers in Rowing Blazers, the new store in Soho, NYC opened by Jack Carlson.
Carlson is the author of Rowing Blazers. When it was first launched at a Ralph Lauren store, I posted about the book in 2014. Carlson's store, unsurprisingly called Rowing Blazers, is at 161 Grand Street, at the corner of Centre Street in Lower Manhattan.
Before we stopped by Rowing Blazers, Alice and I and our daughter Caroline went to lunch at the fabulous Le Coucou restaurant, founded by Daniel Rose, the American-Chef-Who-Opened-Four-Restos-in-Paris-and-Was-a-Success, and Stephen Starr.
I once chatted in a Paris café with Daniel Rose's father, who was surprised and impressed that his son got a rapid following in the challenging environment of Parisian cuisine. Daniel Rose's first resto, Spring One was too small to make money, but Spring Two was three times as big and the numbers worked better, both a popular place and a financial success. He has opened two other restos in Paris since then and they are doing well; but he reportedly plans to close Spring Two as he did his first resto.
He opened Le Coucou with a partner, Stephen Starr, a high-flying restaurateur. The restaurant has been widely exalted, with the James Beard Foundation picking it as the country’s best new restaurant.
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| Le Coucou is formal for an American resto, but informal by the standards of some cathedrals of French cuisine, like Maison Pic, in Valence. |
We were lucky to snag a lunch reservation at Le Coucou on fairly short notice. Everything at Le Coucou was perfect. The waitstaff were formal by American standards but laid back by French ones, at least the top French restaurants that we have visited.
Le Coucou is at 178 Lafayette St, a block away from the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), which we passed on the way from Rowing Blazers.
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| Book talk at MOCA. |
MOCA is having a book talk on Chinese typewriters.
As the photos in this post show, Rowing Blazers is an upscale store for people interested in rowing. I talked to a friend in mid-December who purchased an English rugby shirt (red rose badge), and he recommended I pay a visit to the store.
Alas, it was closed when we stopped by, but management was away between Christmas and New Year's for a vacation, a very European decision. Alas, we don't expect to be back from Florida until April, so these photos will have to suffice as my report on the store.
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| Rowing Blazers is at Centre and Grand Streets. |
Much of the inventory is available on their website, to which I have provided a link above. I checked out a blue rowing blazer that Rowing Blazers sells. It is cotton with European/ American tailoring, vs. the synthetic fabric used on the blazers sold by Ralph Lauren, which is tailored in Asia. Rowing Blazers is clearly going for quality in this case.
However, the Ralph Lauren blazer may well be higher quality than the blazers I looked at in Oxford. The Oxford blazers seem designed for student, not alumni, budgets.
