Omelets don’t typically qualify as gourmet fare,
particularly among people who love haute cuisine. But as he scrambled to prepare one, ransacking his college-room refrigerator for cheddar and salsa, Kevin Sabet was doing his utmost to redeem his first date with Shahrzad Sabet.
The couple shared more than the same last name. As graduate students at England’s Oxford University who hailed from the Pacific coast, both felt a long way from home. Both are of the Baha’i faith and Iranian parentage. Although they had a lot in common, it was his cooking that really impressed her.
Kevin dubs that first improvised meal together their “love omelet,” the symbol of a romance that progressed as the pair travelled in Europe, recording memories of their favourite restaurants the way other travellers collect postcards. Later, after a move to the east coast of the U.S., at a riverside retreat an hour from Boston, Kevin dropped to one knee and offered Shahrzad his grandmother’s wedding ring, an original poem, and his eternal love. After she weepily accepted his proposal, they “went out and shared the biggest ice-cream sundae in Portland, Maine.”
Shahrzad, 28, says she had been planning for this moment since the age of 11. A confessed “obsessive about weddings,” she drew inspiration for hers from the boxes of wedding magazines she had collected over the years.
In one of them, she found a dress that she roughly sketched and took to Vancouver designer Manuel Mendoza, who created the gown and, with his assistant, dressed the bride on the day. Her silk dupioni gown and bouffant chignon evoked a young Audrey Hepburn, one of Kevin’s favorite actresses. She added an elegant chiaroscuro touch by dressing her attendants in classic black.
She wanted the wedding in her hometown Vancouver, and loved the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver’s Pacific Ballroom, which could easily accommodate their reception guest list of 400. Thanks to a couple of quick trips to the West Coast and the enormous help of both families, the wedding preparations went seamlessly.
Almost. Kevin laughs as he recounts “bonding with Shahrzad’s dad” in their harrowing last-minute attempt to get 400 made-to-order chiavari chairs to their destination at the ballroom. The chairs came from China in the midst of a toxic-chemical scare that detained them in customs until the last minute.
The setting for the wedding would not be out of place in a classic black-and-white movie. The ceremony in the hotel’s British Room took place on a dais in front of filmy drapes, with guests seated on white, slip-covered chairs. For the reception in the Pacific Ballroom, white linens adorned the tables set with the pale-wood chiavari chairs.
The ceremony itself provided spiritual nourishment. “The Baha’i ceremony is simple, and includes one vow, which we both said—to abide by the will of God—and we added some prayers. “We chose writings from the Baha’i faith,” says Kevin. Although no clergy was involved, a Baha’i marriage officer, a friend of the family, administered the wedding.
Music proved to be the proverbial food of love at this celebration. With his bride looking as if she had just stepped from the 1961 Hepburn film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it was altogether fitting when Kevin burst into song at the reception with the Elvis hit from the same year, “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” His brother-in-law wrote and sang a song for the couple. Ostad Shamlou, considered the world’s foremost classical Persian violinist, happens to live in Vancouver, and played as guests entered and exited. The Malcolm Aiken Quartet played jazz as guests moved from the ceremony to the Granville Island Room to sample tiny Persian sweets before entering the elegance of the Pacific Ballroom.
At the gourmet reception dinner, guests tucked into appetizers of seared tuna and spicy prawns. Kevin and Shahrzad named each table for a different restaurant as a little flavour of the couple’s time in Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, England and the States.
Their life is a moveable feast. Kevin and Shahrzad now make their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a senior consultant to governments and non-governmental organizations in Washington, and she is a graduate student at Harvard. He continues to make her love omelets. |
5089.jpg)
