Jocelyn Rose DeGroot-Lutzner was thinking about her father when she wandered into the West Philadelphia restaurant Dahlak in 2013 to apply for a bartending job.
The restaurant, a favorite local hangout, was a seven-minute walk from her parents’ house. “My dad and his friends drank at Dahlak,” she said. “I didn’t want to mess up his vibe.”
When she got the job and began working there, she would eventually prove less of a distraction to her father than to the man who hired her, Ephream Amare Seyoum.
Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner, 33, and Mr. Seyoum, 36, are West Philadelphia natives. Growing up, they lived four blocks apart but never met.
Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner might not have applied for the bartending gig if it weren’t for an endorsement from a friend. “She said Ephream’s a really nice guy,” Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner said. She was also at a professional crossroads.
Months earlier, she graduated from the New School in New York City. “I always thought I wanted to move to Brooklyn and be a fashion designer,” she said. But after earning a bachelor’s degree in urban studies and fashion photography, she decided to return home. “I tested the waters in New York,” she said. “I decided Philly was much more comfortable for me.”
Her parents, Jessica DeGroot and Jeffrey Lutzner, raised her and a younger brother in an especially comfortable environment. “They both worked from home, so they were always around,” she said.
Mr. Lutzner was the head of an overseas door and window company; Ms. DeGroot ran a nonprofit group. “We had sit-down dinners together every night,” Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner said. “That felt different from a lot of my close friends’ families.”
Mr. Seyoum’s family also felt different. His mother, Neghisti Ghebrehiwet, and father, Amare Solomon, left Eritrea, which borders Ethiopia and the Red Sea, in the early 1980s. They met in Philadelphia when Ms. Ghebrehiwet was opening Dahlak in 1984, where she remains the owner and head chef. By the time Mr. Seyoum was in high school, he was the oldest of three siblings and helping at the restaurant. In 2005, his father died of a heart attack.
“That was a pivotal point in my life, because my dad was a very special person in the neighborhood,” he said. “I always hear stories about him, how he looked out for people’s safety.” A mural of Mr. Solomon remains painted on a building near the restaurant.
Mr. Seyoum worked at Dahlak while earning a bachelor’s degree in organizational development from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He considered a career away from the restaurant business, but the restaurant needed him. When Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner applied for the job in 2013, he was the bar manager, and he was not the type to get involved romantically with employees.
Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner wasn’t single, anyway. She was still in a relationship with her high school boyfriend.
Mr. Seyoum began driving her home, which he felt was safer than her walking at the end of a shift with a pocketful of tips. That’s when Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner realized he was someone she could trust. “It was a thoughtful gesture,” she said. “It meant a lot.”
By the spring of 2016, her relationship had ended, she said, and the rides home in Mr. Seyoum’s stalling Oldsmobile were getting longer. “We’d have to figure out where we could find late-night food,” Mr. Seyoum said. Wawa became a go-to. They would sit double-parked in front of Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner’s apartment to talk and eat chicken corn chowder from cardboard cups.
One night in April, he asked if he could kiss her. “I remember all the butterflies,” Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner said. On July 4, he asked for a commitment. “I didn’t want to jump right into another relationship,” she said. But three days later, she said she was ready.
“We fell in love on those car rides,” Mr. Seyoum said.
Later that year, Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner read an article about the proliferation of pop-up beer gardens. Her father and an uncle owned a vacant lot in West Philadelphia that, cleaned up, seemed like a perfect spot for a seasonal gathering place. The couple opened Pentridge Station Beer Garden in June 2017, with help from both families.
“It felt like someone’s big backyard,” Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner said. “It had an extremely this-is-for-the-neighborhood feel.” In 2020, as it was gaining a reputational foothold, it was forced to shut down for the pandemic.
But Covid proved more difficult for Dahlak. “It had been open more than 30 years, seven days a week, from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m.,” Mr. Seyoum said. “It was hard to convince his mom to come to a hard stop,” Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner said.
“There were so many things to worry about, including everyone’s safety,” Mr. Seyoum said. “We weren’t used to not having money coming in, to being in isolation. And not working.”
By the spring of 2020, with both places closed, Mr. Seyoum moved in with Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner. They had floated the idea of marriage in 2019, but by the end of that year she had asked him to hold off on a proposal. “I told him I’m really happy, but I’m really not ready to be married,” she said.
So he didn’t bring it up again until 2023, when both businesses were back up and running and she was beginning to wonder if he had changed his mind. “I was starting to feel like, ‘OK, I take back what I said in 2019,’” she said. “‘I’m ready now.’”
On May 3, he proposed with a diamond ring of her late grandmother, Yvonne Sytner Lutzner, on a walk through Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia.
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In the spring before their wedding at the Jesus Christ Eritrean Church in Darby, Pa., Mr. Seyoum arranged for Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner to meet at the church with the priest officiating their ceremony, Tsegazeab N. Teweldemedhin. She wanted to make sure the priest understood that theirs would be an interfaith marriage; that she is not Orthodox Christian, like Mr. Seyoum’s family, but raised in a Jewish and Protestant family.
Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner met with him again in August. “The priest had me recite something from his phone,” she said. Soon after, he poured water from a pitcher over her shoulders. “I wasn’t sure what happened, especially since 90 percent of the exchange was in Tigrinya, the Eritrean language,” she said.
Later, she was assured that she had not been baptized, as she initially thought, just “ceremonially blessed.”
At their Oct. 5 wedding, the couple promised to love each other with their whole hearts, follow each other for life and strengthen each other in times of weakness. The ceremony was composed of chanting in Tigrinya and prayers in English. Their 200 guests filled the church, while about a dozen more unexpected attendees from the church community watched the two-hour ceremony on a video screen in the church basement.
Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner, who wanted “something vintage that was thrifted,” wore a white dress sewn by her friend Sarah Culbertson. On a shopping trip to upstate New York, she found two dresses she loved. Ms. Culbertson sewed parts of them together for the finished product, a strapless floor-length gown with a bustle and train. A veil covered her face as she entered the church, escorted by her father. Mr. Seyoum wore a tuxedo adorned with a large boutonniere of colorful dried flowers.
A heavy drumbeat punctuated the solemnity of their vows. But nothing could temper the joy in the room when they were pronounced married. As they recessed into their new life together, cheers, whistles and ululation — a trilling sound practiced by Eritreans to express strong emotion — followed.
On This Day
When Oct. 5, 2024
Where Jesus Christ Eritrean Church, Darby, Pa.
Interfaith Acceptance The decision to marry in the Eritrean church was to honor Mr. Seyoum’s family. Ms. Ghebrehiwet “felt like the church wedding was going to set us up for peace and prosperity in our married life,” Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner said. In the evening, at the 23rd Street Armory in Philadelphia, the focus was on Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner’s Jewish background. During the reception, attended by 600 people, the couple had another ceremony under a huppah. When the bride’s cousin Aaron Selkow pronounced them married, they stomped a glass in celebration.
Eritrean Feast Platters of Eritrean food, much of it prepared by Ms. Ghebrehiwet and other members of the church community, were served buffet-style at the armory reception. On the menu: Doro wat (spicy chicken stew made with drumsticks and hard-boiled eggs), zigni (beef stew made with berbere spices), beg wat (lamb stew), and gomen wat (collard green spiced stew). All were served with injera (traditional Eritrean spongy flatbread made with Teff flour). Dessert included carrot cakes made by Vernon Wilkins, a West Philadelphia baker known as “the Carrot Cake Man,” Beer garden and Dahlak staff members and family helped organize the massive party.
Dad Moments Mr. Lutzner reflected on his mother’s time as a child of the Holocaust after the reception. “She was raised by a Catholic family in Brussels,” he said. Like his daughter, he was pleased to take part in a Jewish ceremony in addition to the church wedding, finding the interfaith support inspiring.
More Celebration The day after the wedding, the couple celebrated at the armory with a traditional second reception, called a Melsi, which included a coffee ceremony. Ms. DeGroot-Lutzner and her seven bridesmaids wore traditional Eritrean clothing. And like the first reception, an Eritrean band played traditional Habesha music.
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