When Meredith Elaina Giuliani and David Coti Garrett met on a blind date in Manhattan in November 2020, talk of their home state helped break the ice.
Both grew up in New Jersey, Ms. Giuliani in Montville and Mr. Garrett in Morristown, a 15-minute drive away. Both were on the same side of New Jersey’s debate over the correct term for a popular breakfast food, too.
“We both call it Taylor ham,” Mr. Garrett said. “We don’t call it pork roll.”
By the time they got engaged, their adopted city was much more on their minds. That was especially evident Oct. 11, when 340 guests joined them at Grand Central Terminal and later at Cipriani for their New York-themed wedding.
Ms. Giuliani, 32, works in strategy and operations for Standard Metrics, an AI company. She is not related to former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, though strangers often assume she is. (Days after the wedding, she was looking forward to changing her name to Garrett to put an end to speculation.)
Her parents, Vito and Rhonda Giuliani, raised her alongside two sisters, one older and one younger. At Villanova University, she received a bachelor’s degree in accounting; later, she earned an M.B.A. from N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business.
In 2015, a certified public accounting job with PricewaterhouseCoopers brought her to a shared apartment in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. The flurry of suitors she met on dating apps during her first few years in the city kept her entertained.
“It was nice to go out to drinks and dinner and meet new people,” she said. “But it was difficult to find something serious. It was a lot of superficial fun.” A friend, Hannah Epstein, was in the same boat. “We bonded over trying to set each other up,” she said.
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Ms. Epstein knew Mr. Garrett through a high school friend. When she introduced them that November, Ms. Giuliani didn’t get her hopes up.
“I was trying to go into it with few expectations,” she said. But at Mother’s Ruin, the lounge in the NoLIta neighborhood where they met, Mr. Garrett handily exceeded the higher ones. “It was really easy to keep the conversation going,” she said.
Mr. Garrett, 32, is a senior manager at the real estate investment company Onyx Equities. He and his older brother are the sons of Robert and Laura Garrett. His bachelor’s degree, from the University of Charleston, is in business administration.
Like Ms. Giuliani, he moved to Manhattan in 2015, but to the Upper West Side. He may not have been having as much fun as she was at first.
“I was never really good on dating apps,” he said. Meaningful relationships felt elusive.
The date at Mother’s Ruin ended with an invitation for another date a week later, this time at his apartment, where the plan was to demonstrate what each considered above-average cooking skills. Mr. Garrett now concedes he might have been exaggerating about his. “I was half-lying,” he said. Ms. Giuliani whipped up a mushroom risotto with Mr. Garrett as her sous chef. After, they shared a kiss.
They wouldn’t become a couple until the fall of 2021. “I was dragging my feet,” Mr. Garrett said. “I finally realized, I don’t want to lose out on a catch.”
By 2024, they were living together in a Flatiron apartment. When Mr. Garrett proposed that year in May on Little Island, a park on the Hudson River, words failed him. “I got down on one knee, but I forgot to ask her to marry me,” he said. But Ms. Giuliani, who had been looking forward to being engaged, got the message.
Their wedding at Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall, chosen for its significance to New York and its majestic architecture, was the first to be held there since 2014, according to an M.T.A. spokesman.
Ms. Giuliani wore a custom Ysa Makino wedding gown with sparkle and feather flourishes for her walk down an aisle bedecked with mirrors and white flowers. Mr. Garrett donned a custom Tom James jacquard tuxedo. Former New York Giants player Harry Carson, a Garrett family friend, obtained a one-day officiant’s license to marry them; before they read handwritten vows, he flipped a coin to decide who would read first. Ms. Giuliani got the honors.
When the couple was pronounced married, guests showered them with confetti. Then came Champagne and an “all aboard” call to a reception at nearby Cipriani — Ms. Giuliani had designed a mock ticket booth she called “Garrett Central Station” where guests picked up pretend tickets with their seat assignments.
“We marched everybody across the street” to the venue, she said. As the cocktail area at Cipriani was being transformed for the after-party — where guests later enjoyed New York staples like Joe’s Pizza — Ms. Giuliani surprised Mr. Garrett with a serenade.
“I had been secretly practicing Hall & Oates’s ‘You Make My Dreams Come True,’ for three months,” she said. “It really represented how I feel.”
Mr. Garrett climbed onstage during the song at her request.
“She sings a lot in the shower, but this was a total surprise,” he said. “It was such a special moment for me.”
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