A great celebration of Brittany in New York organized by the BZH New York association

France Bleu Breizh Izel – So you celebrate Brittany a week before everyone else?

Sophie Raubiet, President of the BZH New York Association – It’s true, this year is a bit exceptional. We had agreement from the Brittany region to do that. She plays a big part in helping us financially, so we asked for an exception this year to hold Brittany Day on May 12th instead of May 19th, just to be able to take advantage of this incredible transatlantic sea with the arrival of all the boats. The party will be around the prize giving for the IMOCAs and maybe for the Class40s. We’ll see.

Are you joining these two events to do something even bigger?

We will even go further. This year we even have a historian from the University of Brest and Lorient giving us a lecture on the Isère boat, which is the boat that was built to transport the Statue of Liberty to New York and sank off the coast of Lorient. We will also talk about progress. Because what is incredible is that at that time this boat was built for the Statue of Liberty and for the first time an engine was put on the boat. And today we put back the sails that Sail grain. I have to talk about it because this company is incredible.

It transports manufactured products from France to the United States and brings chocolate back to France.

Exact. And in fact it goes much further since the idea is actually to make sailing cargo ships. Now we call them that and they already have two boats which they have built and which they have adapted to be able to carry out more transport. So it’s revolutionary.

And they are partners in this Brittany celebration. What are the highlights of this festival?

We will start with this small conference. So, from We will eat oysters, we will eat sausage pancakes, we will eat Breton cake, we will eat Hénaff paté toast, there will also be Mouettes d’Arvor rillettes. We have plenty of Breton products for all our members and guests to taste. We have about 450 people listed already, so that’s pretty amazing.

How many Bretons are there in New York?

It is very difficult to say! We know that there are approximately 30,000 French people in the New York region. Now the Bretons are not specifically registered, so it is not easy to know. In addition, there are Bretons, there are half-Bretons, there are Breton roots, but not necessarily Breton. Anyway, it’s very complicated. As an association, we have around 180 active members, i.e. people who pay dues every year. But we have almost 3,500 followers, meaning people who receive our newsletter every month when they come to New York will definitely come to our events, knowing that we do events almost every month.

The aim of this association is to hold almost monthly events. What do you organize?

There are sailing trips, the St. Patrick’s Day parade of course, very important because we really have our place in the parade that is officially part of the parade. So we can invite bagad, which we try to do next year. And we also do events with the Alliance Française where we sell pancakes in the streets of New York, we have garden parties in Central Park thanks to Hénaff. Then of course we also do Breton Christmas. Finally, a very important event that has been highly publicized over the past four years is our kouign amann competition.

Is it exceptional to organize this here in New York?

It really is the best at the level of the Bretons and it has become a competition that is very followed. We have eight different chefs participating. They can be confectioners or bakers. It’s quite interesting because we’re even starting to have people coming from outside of New York and especially from Montreal, which makes us very happy because there are a lot of Bretons in Montreal as well.

Do we need to come together among Bretons, even when we live in New York?

For anyone who travels a lot. Having roots and hanging on to the roots, I think that is important. Personally, I have been here for 30 years. I have only been with the association for seven or eight years. But I understood that it was important and that it was a small part of his home somewhere else. We have a lot in common. We know the region, we know a lot of people there, sometimes we find ourselves in Brittany when we go there in the summer. So it really makes reconnecting much easier. Now I can travel to Brittany anywhere. Before I only knew my area, Paimpol, but now I know so many people in Finistère, in Morbihan, everywhere in central Brittany, it’s great!

And all the Bretons meet this Sunday in New York, on the occasion of Brittany Day, along with the arrival of this transatlantic race with the prize giving.

In addition, it is still quite exceptional because we have an incredible space. We will do it on a boat. A museum ship from South Seaport. It’s the old port of New York where there’s this huge museum ship that’s been there, docked for years and we had the opportunity to do that on this boat. So to do a Breton event on a boat with 200 skippers and 200 New Yorkers is quite extraordinary.