Champions of darts.

Routines establish inadvertently but can come to define an existence. Several of mine have revolved around the routes I walk. They become ingrained, and I rarely deviate.

Several years ago, before I came to Denmark, I lived in a bedsit, albeit in a quaint part of town. My neighbours were a chronically shy, morbidly obese woman, and a diffident man who worked as an orderly in a psychiatric ward.

Jo and Paul, such were their names, developed an intense dislike for me and my friend Thomas - who had a bedsit on the floor below - thanks to our tendency to drink heavily at weekends and come home late and play Pixies records as loud as possible.

As the years drifted by, Jo and Paul moved away, Thomas moved to Australia, and my girlfriend of the time left to go and live in London. What routines I’d established quickly unspooled. Unthinkingly, I began developing new ones.

The most common was a near-daily excursion to my local pub. What sticks in my mind today is not the days and evenings I spent inside, but my brief walk to get there. It was just a few streets but the houses were pretty - Victorian terraces, the odd townhouse. In my loneliness I took to imagining the lives of the upwardly mobile couples and settled families inside, a habit that only served to exacerbate my gloomy mood.

The Unabomber, as drawn by Andrew Dodds

One of the large houses lining my route was owned by a gentleman whose physical appearance was oddly reminiscent of that of the Unabomber. He lived alone and was politely referred to as an eccentric. One day his eccentricity got the better of him and he was seen pointing a rifle out of an upstairs window at a traffic warden working in the street below. A full-scale police siege ensued which ended with the would-be marksman serving a two-stretch.

My walks to the pub continued. I became a regular; a member of a special band, each of us in the thrall of our routines, each of us part of the others’. The pictures on the wall - mostly of darts and cricket teams of days gone by - began to hold an uncomfortable fascination for me. I started seeing my own face in them. I was probably going a bit barmy.

More years passed. I left and came to live in Denmark. Where now I reminisce about darts nights at my local pub.

Chris and I started CPH Meal last year with the goal of putting on occasional food events in the city. It’s been a lot of fun, and for two people that work in advertising, also a great learning experience. The purpose of this post is to share some personal reflections on the process of building our little brand.

Learn From Others - While almost by definition every new venture is unique, the experiences of others can serve as inspiration. I’ve watched closely as the guys at Inventory have built their brand from square one. In just a couple of years they’ve gone from being just another men’s style blog to a full-on player in the men’s fashion scene with their own magazine, online retail venture and, most recently, an actual shop.

Most impressively, they’ve not made any obvious missteps along the way. They’ve kept their visuals nice and clean, they’ve put their own personalities and vision at the core of the brand and they’ve been gracious. Put simply, they’ve been clear-sighted, dedicated and genuine.

I should also mention that Hugh MacLeod’s evolving thoughts on what he’s termed the ‘Global Microbrand‘ have also been an influence, as has Monocle magazine. Its consistent focus on small-scale enterprises undertaken with passion and verve is always a good reminder that it can be done. You just need to do it.

Define the Why - When we recently relaunched our site, the section that caused us most soul-searching was the About page. Chris and I had lots of conversations about what CPH Meal was all about. We both had our own ideas and our attempts to come up with a unified text led to a lot of over-intellectualization. But looking back, I think it was a necessary process - by defining what we weren’t, we started getting closer to what we were.

We went back to basics and set down some of the principles we shared and then Chris went away and wrote a text that nailed it. It taught us that coherency for a brand (even one as miniscule as ours) is not easy - you have to graft, you have to tweak and hone, and you have to be prepared to evolve.

Be Personable - This basically means be pleasant. It applies to most things in life and branding is no different. Chris and I are not trying to build a cult of our personalities (we’re far too straight-laced for that), but we’re trying to forge the brand in an open, honest and transparent way. What that means in practice is signing our names at the end of blog posts, linking to our own Twitter accounts on our bio page, and making sure that we host our events graciously.

Pay Attention to Detail - John Foster Dulles wrote that a man’s accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail (thank you Google). This is so obvious, but so important. When you’re working with chefs of the level of Rob Martin and Ben Greeno, you know that the food is going to be something special. The job Chris and I have is to make sure that everything else is too. That means anything from making sure toilets are clean and fully stocked with paper and our menus are accurate, to checking that our punctuation is spot-on (still a work in progress).

I was hoping to make this a list of ten or five but these four seem to me to be a good start. It all comes down to doing something you believe in and doing it well.

I’m in New York, staying at The Ace Hotel just off Broadway on 29th Street. This city is so overwhelmingly huge that I’ve felt a need for context way beyond anything I’ve experienced before. Unfortunately, The Ace’s welcoming bumph details very little of the building’s history, mentioning only that it started life as Hotel Breslin in 1904 (shown above) and that the current owners attempted to retain as many original fixtures as possible, namely the lobby’s ‘ornate coffered ceilings and mosaic tile floors’. But the web reveals more.

The name Hotel Breslin evokes pre-Jazz Age Manhattan, a city forging upwards and outwards at breakneck speed. Buildings like The Breslin became the bones of the city, enduring structures on which we drape temporary furnishings. Their survival, or otherwise, is governed by chance - the confluence of opinion, influence and relative disrepair. The building once known as Hotel Breslin remains, even as what it once was disappears. But some of its stories persist, helping to shape the present, providing a little of its form even.

Here are some of those stories:

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Much like The Ace today, Hotel Breslin was initally painfully hip. In a fascinating piece documenting the protracted dispute between long-term tenants and the developers, the NYT notes the following:

Soon after opening, it became one of New York’s best known hotels. Notables like Diamond Jim Brady frequented the Dixie Room, its fashionable dancing and dining spot. The Breslin also catered to visiting foreign businessmen; in 1907, for instance, executives of Fiat, Renault and other foreign carmakers gathered there to discuss their coming exhibition at Madison Square Garden.

As the years passed, in part owing to the Breslin’s proximity to Tin Pan Alley on West 28th Street, the hotel also acquired a reputation as an artists’ hangout. It housed characters like Patrick Roche, a cafe proprietor and fight promoter, who used to sit in his favorite chair in the lobby, now painted the same faded pink as the hotel exterior, and receive actors and fighters who were down on their luck and needed his help.

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In its declining years, the hotel also hosted one Harry Everett Smith, American archivist, ethnomusicologist, student of anthropology, record collector, experimental filmmaker, artist, bohemian and mystic. The blog Celestial Monochord has more, including the following from Allan Ginsberg, an acquaintance of Mr Smith’s:

Then Harry went into a funny kind of amphetamine tailspin.  He got really paranoid and got moved out of the Chelsea, I think, or expelled or something.  He couldn’t pay his rent, and wound up in a series of other hotels, including the Breslin Hotel, by 1984.  But he wouldn’t talk to anybody, wouldn’t talk to me, maybe because I didn’t supply him with money, because I was broke at the time …

I didn’t see Harry for a long while and began visiting him again at the Breslin Hotel, on 28th Street and Broadway.  Same problem, still wanting money …

In that room at the Breslin, the whole room was taken up with shelves of books and records, then a movie editing table, and a tiny bed.  I have some photographs of that, of him pouring milk, The Alchemist Transforming Milk into Milk.

In that bathroom he had a little birdie that he fed and talked to, and let out of his cage all the time.  When his little birds died, he put their bodies in the freezer.  He’d keep them for various alchemical purposes, along with a bottle, which he said was several years’ deposits of his semen, which he was also using for whatever magic structures.

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The New York Observer, reporting on the difficulties in getting The Ace up and running, tells how hotelier Alex Calderwood struck a deal with another of the building’s former tenants:

For example, there’s this woman: She actually lived here for a long time, then decided to move, but she still lives in the neighborhood. She owns a glove factory across the street. It’s been in her family for years and years and years; I think it’s the oldest glove factory in Manhattan. We met her and she’s great. … So we’ve put together a program where we’re going to have a bespoke glove service for the guests. We’ll do the fitting here and the next day the gloves are waiting in your room.

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I don’t know if the glove service ever made it off the ground. I hope so. I like the idea of owning a bespoke pair of gloves made in Manhattan’s oldest glove factory that I bought in a hotel that was once a different hotel.

Last weekend was a little more purposeful though. The Sophster and I travelled to the Danish island of Bornholm and bought a Border Terrier puppy we have named Bobby, after my grandfather. Like my grandfather, he seems to have a rather mischievous sense of humour. Which is a polite way of saying he’s a little bastard.

I made it to the Friday parties at this year’s Distortion Festival here in Copenhagen. It was a lot of fun, hanging out with some great friends, drinking some beers, people-watching. They describe it as a ‘loosely orchestrated street and club festival’ and that sums it up perfectly.

One friend noted that the festival shows Copenhagen at its relaxed, accepting best. Indie kids, white kids, club kids, Asian kids, families - anyone and everyone happily mingling on the streets. No aggression, no bad vibes.

The rest of my pics from the night are here.

This is my mate Dean.

Sometimes, when he’s a little drunk, he pokes me in the ribs, puts his arm round my shoulders and asks: ‘You know what I like about you geez?’

‘What’s that then?’ I say.

‘Everything’, he tells me.