An Elegant Winter Wedding at ROIA Restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut

When Jennifer Najjar (29, an insurance operations professional) and Daniel Najjar (29, a management consultant) got engaged, they had known each other for 11 years already.“We got engaged during a cross-country ski excursion in February 2013 after 11 years of friendship and five years of dating,” Jennifer says. “After, we hopped a plane to Beirut to visit with Dan’s father’s extended family, many of which I had never met. The trip ended with a two-night stay in Istanbul, a magical way to celebrate the start of the wedding planning. With a winter wedding, we knew we would be asking our guests to be indoors for the majority of the day. Given this, it was important to us that we find compelling indoor spaces to entertain our guests. Further, with the possibility of winter weather, we wanted our venues to be no more than a cab ride away from one another. New Haven, with its historic charm and cosmopolitan nature, offered us several options to consider, and in the end we decided much to our delight to host our wedding ceremony at our parish – St. Mary’s Church –and the exquisite Roia Restaurant for our reception. We wanted our wedding to be what we suspect many couples desire: an elegant, unique and joyous celebration that reflects the aspects of life that we appreciate most. For us, those aspects are tradition, history, food and live music. With our desires outlined, and the practical considerations in view, it did not take us long to get excited about the idea of a New England winter wedding in historic New Haven, Connecticut.”