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Coffee shop customers sipping their lattes in West Vancouver’s Horseshoe Bay were surprised on Sunday when an impromptu wedding happened in their midst.
Pam Sevilla was waiting for a ferry in Blenz coffee shop Sunday afternoon ordering a drink around 1:30 p.m. when she noticed the baristas all looking at something behind her. When she turned around, she saw a man and woman apparently getting married in the middle of the coffee shop.
The bride, in a white sundress and cream-coloured blazer, clasped hands with the groom dressed in a white shirt and dark-coloured shorts while they said their vows as they stood beside another woman who appeared to an officiant.
The coffee shop wasn’t very full, but “we were all watching,” she said.
Hugo Orozco was working at the coffee shop on Sunday and said he had no warning the impromptu wedding was about to take place.
At first, Orozco said he thought the wedding might have been a joke or a performance, but when he looked at the officiant, “She was quite serious,” he said.
Once the couple had exchanged vows, Orozco said he quickly put Mendelsohn’s Wedding March on over the coffee shop’s sound system while customers burst into applause.
“Everyone was clapping and happy,” he said.
Orozco said it remains mysterious why the couple chose to get married in the coffee shop. One of his colleagues asked the bride if the couple had met in the shop, but that didn’t seem to be the case, he said.
“They just needed to do it and they did it,” he said. “They were very happy and emotional.”
Afterwards, the couple took some photos outside in the rainy weather and then got into an SUV and left, he said.
Orozco said in more than 20 years in the hospitality business he’s never seen an impromptu wedding in a coffee shop before.
“It was cute and strange at the same time,” he said.
