The reception had to be kosher, which, at first, narrowed down the dining options. “Thankfully, Yoni is a major foodie and well connected around town,” Jessie says. The groom hired food trucks from some of the top kosher restaurants to park right in front of the venue, in addition to having catering staff plate the food and pass it around to tables like tapas throughout the night. “That way people could sit and eat at the assigned tables or grab food from different stations around the venue.” Award-winning chefs from Izzy’s Smokehouse and Noi Due Carne served up a wide array of rotating options: fried chicken sandwiches, Korean chicken wings, sliders, arancini, and a few salads to start; then rigatoni bolognese and short-rib cavatelli pastas, fresh smoked pastramis and briskets, and chicken marsala around dinner time; and finally, individual peanut-butter-mousse cakes, chocolate soufflés, and pecan pies for desserts.
Lulu Cake Boutique in Scarsdale, New York (which Yoni has patronized since he was a child), rushed to make their dream cake happen on short notice: a two-tier cake made of vanilla cake with a passionfruit curd, cream cheese frosting, and chocolate chips on the bottom tier and a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and crushed pecans on top. Due to the laws of kashruth, the cake had to come out early on and be sliced for everyone to see, before a slice of each was placed in to-go boxes for guests to take home at the end of the night. “At the very beginning of the wedding planning, Yoni told me, ‘You can plan and do whatever you want—really. Just let me have my food and my cake,’” Jessie recalls. “Thankfully, I did and he really delivered. Everyone commented on the food and how great it was.”
Their first dance was to “‘Big Jet Plane” by Angus and Julia Stone, which Jessie had played for Yoni on their first date. “First dances are kind of awkward but also super special and fun,” she says. “There is something so cool in opening this moment between us with all those loved ones around us to see how much we’ve grown together and how our love has blossomed since we first danced together to that song. It felt like things had come full circle in a sense, going from strangers falling in love to lovers, sealing it all within a single moment that spread itself five years apart.”
While the couple was moved by the heartfelt speeches Yoni’s parents gave, Jessie’s favorite moment was the completely spontaneous challah bread tossing after the blessings. “People were treating it like the bouquet tossing or a raffle and just cheering and tossing food all around to each other,” she smiles.
After the reception, the couple drove back to their old neighborhood, where they’d rented the Skyline suite of the Williamsburg Hotel, situated right on the water and facing the city skyline—the same view in the same spot when Yoni proposed two years earlier. As for their honeymoon? “I travel a lot for work, so planning can be hard,” Jessie says. “But we plan on going back to London and will be traveling across Europe for a month sometime in the summer for work and pleasure. We’ve learned to embrace our spontaneous lifestyle and try to make each day as if it were a honeymoon.”
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