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Daily Mirror
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Rugby ace Jordan Turner-Hall marries girlfriend at three-day vineyard wedding
Former rugby union player Jordan Turner-Hall tied the knot with his beautiful bride Sophie Burles in a stunning ceremony at a Sussex vineyard. Here, the couple open up about their love bubble'... After meeting almost two decades ago, tying the knot was a long time coming for former rugby union player Jordan Turner-Hall and his fiancée Sophie Burles. But when the pair finally said 'I do' at picturesque Sussex vineyard Rathfinny Wine Estate, it felt like everything had fallen into place. 'It was such an amazing day. We just had a big party and celebrated our love,' says bride Sophie, 36, when we chat just days after their stunning nuptials. And she and Jordan, 37, admit they're still 'in a bubble' after their magical day. The celebrations kicked off on Friday 20 June with a barbecue at the venue for 40 of their nearest and dearest – and they didn't do it half-heartedly. 'Friday was a bit of a late one, so we were all slightly hungover,' former Harlequins centre Jordan admits. 'But thankfully the wedding wasn't until 3pm the next day, so we had time to have a good breakfast and get feeling good again.' Delicate heads aside, the couple, who got engaged during a dreamy holiday in Santorini two years ago, looked picture perfect on their big day. Sophie – who admits she followed a gruelling pre-wedding diet – opted for a beautiful off-the-shoulder wedding gown by Essense of Australia, with a lengthy train flowing behind her. 'Everything I thought I wanted in a dress went out of the window when it came to shopping for it. None of what I wanted suited me,' she says of her bridal shopping experience. 'It was my sister who said I should try on the one I eventually chose – and it was just perfect.' It certainly ticked all the boxes for Jordan, who admits that despite his tough guy image he struggled to hold back his emotions when he saw Sophie walking down the aisle. 'I was blown away,' he says. 'I didn't think I'd get so emotional but when I saw Sophie coming down with the kids and bridesmaids, they all looked beautiful. It was overwhelming. I was immensely proud and happy. I'm not used to talking about me and our love so openly but yeah, it definitely hit me. It was beautiful.' It's no surprise Jordan had tears in his eyes during the ceremony, which also included the couple's children Marnie, 11, Mason, nine, and six-year-old Cassius. Sophie, who met Jordan when she was just 19 years old, was proudly walked down the aisle by Mason as Romeo + Juliet movie hit I'm Kissing You , by singer Des'ree, played – a song that has always been special to the couple. 'Our daughter Marnie was a bridesmaid, then Mason walked me down the aisle while Cassius was the ringbearer,' Sophie says. 'Mason almost chickened out. I was like, 'Please don't leave me on my own!' But he did it and it was quite emotional. All the bridesmaids started crying just before we walked, so I had to try not to look at them or it would have set me off.' She adds, 'The kids were so excited. They were telling everybody at school about it. We wanted to get married a long time ago, but I'm glad I did it now, so the kids could be such a key part of it.' Sealing their union with personalised vows, Jordan, it seems, had a tight turnaround writing his. Sophie says, 'I'd written mine a long time ago, then two days before the wedding Jordan was like, 'What are the vows?' and he had to write his. But they were really nice in the end.' Jordan tells us he was too focused on planning his groom's speech for later in the day – and thankfully, all the effort was worth it. The speech, he says, had their 100 guests both laughing and crying as they toasted the couple with a glass of Sussex sparkling rosé, made on site at the venue's vineyard. 'I did quite a lot of research into my speech and didn't want to just list off thank yous to everyone,' he says. 'So I said nice things and also tried to get the energy up in the room.' All of the speeches were emotional, everyone loved them,' Sophie adds. Steering away from tradition, the couple opted for a sharing-style meal with grazing steak boards by catering company The Herb Kitchen for guests to tuck into. Then it was time for everyone to let their hair down. 'We've been to so many weddings where people were waiting around for things, and we wanted ours to be quick, so we could get to the fun part. We wanted everyone on the dance floor just enjoying a big party – and that's exactly what we did,' Sophie says. There were a few familiar faces enjoying their day of love, including presenter Zoe Hardman and her husband, former rugby player Paul Doran Jones, and a string of Jordan's rugby pals including Danny Care, Nick Evans, Joe Marler and David Strettle. Jordan and Sophie admit they deliberately seated the rugby players far from the top table, to keep noise levels at bay. 'There was a rugby table and I think they were having the best time ever,' says Sophie. 'Jordan put them right at the very end so there wasn't too much commotion.' 'Yeah, there were a few drinking games going on over there,' he laughs. The couple couldn't be happier with how their special day went. Their only regret is that they're not jetting off on honeymoon sooner. 'The kids went straight back to school the Monday after and we were back to normal life,' says Sophie. 'We would have liked to go on a honeymoon straight away but we're planning a trip to Italy later this year.' While they wish they could revisit their big day, the pair are glad to be stress-free after a frenetic period of wedding planning. 'The month before the wedding it got stressful, especially the last two weeks. We had guests saying last minute that they couldn't come or asking to bring other guests, which was hard. And all the small details, like sorting stationery, it was challenging,' admits Sophie. Jordan adds, 'There were quite a few pre-wedding arguments. But we agreed that when the day came, we'd let go of all the stress and just enjoy it, which is what we did.' The stress wouldn't put them off doing it all again though. 'I think one day we'd like to renew our vows in the same place, that would be really nice,' Sophie says. 'Can we do it for half the price next time, though?' laughs Jordan, and his new wife nods reassuringly. Looking to the future, the couple also say more children aren't off the cards. 'I love babies and I'm definitely broody,' Sophie admits with a giggle. 'But it is hard work and Jordan's away a lot, so it would probably send me over the edge having another one. We got a second dog at Christmas, so that's suppressed the broodiness, for now. But watch this space.'
Metro
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Blue's Lee Ryan announces he is about to welcome 6th child with cheeky video
Lee Ryan has revealed his wife is pregnant once again in a hilarious Britney Spears-themed post, announcing his sixth child is on the way. The Blue icon, 42, took to TikTok to share the good news with a picture of himself and Verity Paris, who was sporting a baby bump. Posing by the piano, Lee was beaming as he put his hand on his wife's stomach as she smiled from ear to ear in a stunning pink silky dress. The snap was set to Britney Spears' hit track Oops I Did It Again, inspiring Lee's playful caption. ''Oooops we did it again' baby number 4 on the way to add to our lovely little family!,' he wrote. 'Another vibe to join the tribe we are truly grateful.' The All Rise singer pointed out another one of their children had snuck into the snap, calling his son on the piano chair a 'little Elton John'. Lee and Verity — who was on The X Factor in 2009 — have three children together, two girls and a boy, born in 2023, 2022, and 2021. They tied the knot in 2022 in Seville, with all of Blue — Duncan James, Antony Costa, and Simon Webbe — in attendance. He is also dad to Bluebell, 18, who he shares with Jessica Keevil and daughter Rayn, 16, with ex Samantha Miller. Congratulations filled the comments from fans and friends alike, quickly racking up over 4,000 likes and hundreds of messages. 'Congratulations mate,' DJ Scott Robinson said before joking: 'I think you need to get a TV in your bedroom lol.' Lee replied: 'Haha yeah thanks bro 😎 I can't afford a tv….. 📺 we don't like the brainwashing box anyway.' Samantha Harvey said: 'Starting your own band, mate!! Hahah congratulations!! ♥️♥️.' EastEnders star Shona McGarty added: 'AHHH NO WAY!!!! Yay! Xxx ❤️congratulations to you both xxx 💝.' 'I'm so happy you have found happiness and you have a beautiful family. Congratulations ❤️,' wrote Dory Leigh. In an emotional response, Lee said: 'Took me a while to get away from bad people who were trying to ruin my life. Once I left everything got better x.' Lee has been very open about his life, previously sharing a loved-up details about his and Verity's wedding. He told OK!: 'The service incorporated different religions and spiritual elements along with lots of different music, which made everyone cry. I walked down the aisle with my newborn son in my arms dressed in matching tux to Time by Hans Zimmer, played by a string quartet. More Trending 'Then watching my wife walk down the aisle to I'm Kissing You by Des'ree sung by a gospel choir… that took my breath away.' Phones were banned at the ceremony, with the couple wanting family members to be in the moment rather than filming it. Speaking about his kids, he added: 'Our children are our lives. Our two girls were flower girls and our little boy was all dressed up too. They were all at the front with us, as you can see in some of the photos.' Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you.
Los Angeles Times
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Have menu fatigue? Enter another dimension at a Santa Ana industrial park
The restaurant is situated in a Santa Ana industrial complex surrounded by sprawling concrete buildings, in the sort of center where you'd expect to find a post office, a cleaners and maybe a chain restaurant that pushes build-your-own poke bowls. You walk through the front door of Darkroom and it's as if you've leapt into another dimension. The dining room, as the name suggests, is dim enough to develop a roll of film at your table, or at the very least blur the edges of your date like a real-life filter. The sensation of light being sucked from your aura like a black hole is intentional, and your first introduction to the wild, whimsical mind of chef and owner Zach Scherer. Imagine your cool friend from college, the one with really good taste in music, throwing a dinner party where the vibes are consistently immaculate. A dim red glow sets the mood, and the staff provides the soundtrack, plucking from a wall of vinyl that includes around 800 records. During the course of one dinner, you might hear the entirety of an alt-J album followed by Van Halen's 'Jump,' 'Pretty Piece of Flesh' from One Inch Punch and Des'ree's 'I'm Kissing You.' The menu is as unpredictable as the music, zigzagging between Asian, Mediterranean and Latin influences before skidding to a stop at dessert. And it will likely change with each visit. During my first dinner, meaty olives were stuffed with anchovy and merguez, battered and fried like Scotch eggs and served over smeared labneh with a sprinkle of sumac. A pile of calamari played second fiddle to a garnish of braised cabbage cooked like sweet and slack caramelized onions. Gnocchi was fashioned out of nuggets of pâte à choux dough, grainy like prized clumps of cream of wheat, in a rich turnip sauce brightened with lemon zest. If you're experiencing menu fatigue, weary of the parkerhouse rolls, gem lettuce salads and crudo at just about every 'small plates' restaurant in town, consider Darkroom the antidote. The Nashville hot swordfish is organized chaos on a plate, with fillet of swordfish coated in almond flour and potato starch and pan-fried until the center is firm and succulent. The hot sauce is made with Calabrian chiles, red wine vinegar, butter and a little cayenne, giving the dish a little smoke and must without any real heat. Spilled over the top is a sauce gribiche, like deviled eggs deliquesced into an extra herbaceous tartar sauce. A fresh salad made from sliced onion, pickles and plenty of dill marinated in shirodashi is scattered over the top. The more stuff you can fit on your fork, the greater the reward. Most of the dishes are vaguely nostalgic but infused with Scherer's distinct sensibility. He sous-vides hanger steak at 130 degrees for 24 hours, then grills it to order. It's dipped in koji butter and plated alongside a mound of creamed Bloomsdale spinach cooked down with miso, shirodashi, verjus and cream. It's the recognizable steakhouse plate given the Darkroom treatment, rendering the most tender iteration of the hanging tenderloin and a creamed spinach blasted with umami. The steak and spinach sit in a vermouth-based demi-glace that coats the plate in an ultra meaty glaze. Then he dresses the steak with a chili crisp that gets its crunch from buckwheat and sesame seeds fried with Aleppo pepper and mushroom bouillon. 'I wanted to make something that I felt didn't exist in Orange County,' he says. 'I built a restaurant that I wanted to hang out at, with music and food being front and center.' The music school dropout quit when he realized music theory would not turn him into a rock star. But his creative streak fueled him through a stint at culinary school in Las Vegas. He returned to California and launched a food truck. Most notably, he was the chef de cuisine at Jason Quinn's Playground, the now-shuttered California gastropub in Santa Ana that helped shape the current culinary scene in Orange County. After cooking briefly at Taco Maria and Bello, he decided it was time to start his own band in the kitchen. He partnered with chef Drew Adams, and the two opened Darkroom in September 2024. In addition to the frequently changing a la carte menu, Scherer and Adams offer an eight-course, $180 tasting menu with additional wine pairings dubbed Chrysalis. The dinners take place in a small room just off the main dining room, Thursday through Saturday evenings. The chefs started Chrysalis as a pop-up dinner series at breweries and other locations around town while they were in the process of opening the restaurant. They continued the dinners after Darkroom opened, giving the two a consistent outlet for their unbridled creativity. The setting is meant to feel like the greenroom or backstage at a show, with tables set into a U-shape. 'What's up, party people?' Scherer says at the start of a recent Chrysalis dinner. He and Adams address the diners from the middle of the room. 'Nyeeerrrhhoooommmm.' Scherer sets the first course in front of me while making an airplane noise. I ask if he has a child at home. 'No. I am the child,' he says with a laugh. If Scherer were the lead singer of a rock band, this would be his side project. It's meant to be more experimental in spirit than fine dining, and more delicious than stuffy. Sliced, poached Kusshi oysters are plump but bite-size in a puddle of hollandaise made with macadamia nut milk and kumquats from Scherer's mother's garden. He makes a variation of yuzu kosho with the kumquats and black lime powder, then freezes it and shaves it over the top. The lime is curry-esque and the pops of intense, bitter, pithy citrus leave my lips tingling. Dinner unfolds as a series of sensations rather than a meal, each course more dumbfounding than the next, and I find myself scraping and licking the serving dishes. Rounds of snap peas grilled in koji butter are fresh and crunchy but with a nice char, sitting in a broth made from snap peas, lemongrass and mint. Over the top is a dollop of California river sturgeon caviar lightly smoked to help coax out the sweetness of the peas. A wedge of Mount Tam cheese with a jagged shard of a sunflower seed cracker serves as the introduction to the dessert courses. Big, juicy stewed Bing cherries spill over the top with a grassy nori oil that helps cut the sweetness and funk from the cheese. It's unexpected, surprisingly cohesive and, yes, a little weird. The seeds for some of the most successful dishes on the restaurant's main a la carte menu are planted during Chrysalis. A zucchini bread with tartare prepared for a holiday dinner is now one of the most compelling reasons to visit. It's a riff on Spanish torrijas and what Scherer calls a 'bastardization' of jambon au beurre. The zucchini bread is swollen with zucchini and egg, effectively a zucchini custard held together with flour. It's cut into a thick slab and seared in a cast-iron skillet with koji butter. It's still sizzling when it hits the table, the edges browned and crisp with a super-luscious pudding-like cake in the middle. Ribbons of Spanish ham are splayed over the top. It's a dozen complex texture sensations in a single square. That initial crunch is cushioned by the richness of the butter and the bread itself, like the most decadent piece of French toast. It could be mistaken for dessert, if not for the intense, porky savoriness of the ham. If this ever leaves the menu, I may shed a tear. The smoked and confited maitake mushrooms that once served as a vegetarian entree during Chrysalis are now a Darkroom menu staple. The mushrooms are smoked with cherry wood, then confited in a mixture of butter, olive oil and Vietnamese-style mushroom bouillon. Mushrooms have never tasted more like themselves, the smoke amplifying the rich, woodsy mushrooms and the grill crisping the fungi's many petals. A three-course menu called Apogee, available Thursday evenings, acts as another avenue for R&D and a third way to experience the restaurant. It's $95 per person and includes wine pairings; supplements are available for purchase. Recently, the menu included a grilled cruciferous salad of broccoli and wilted greens hidden under a mountain of smoked cheddar curls. The buttermilk crab dressing brought to mind a good Caesar but with sweet crab undertones. It registered as something more substantial than a bowl salad, maybe a steakhouse side dish or the makings of a rich casserole. The entree for the evening was an Iberico pork loin pounded until it resembled a cutlet, sheathed in panko and fried in a mixture of clarified butter and canola oil. Over the top, tiny squares of pickled kohlrabi. And underneath, a beurre monté spiked with horseradish and salty pops of smoked trout roe with a swirl of chive oil. There was something about the fleeting nature of the dishes that made me both sad and excited for my next visit. Lucky for me (and you), the pork schnitzel made its way onto the main menu. Without a full liquor license, there's a small selection of wine, beer and a cocktail menu by bar director Gianna Marcario. Her mad-scientist beverage style matches the unwieldy nature of the restaurant, with small batches of infused vermouth highlighted in many of the drinks. A lavender-black-pepper-bay-leaf vermouth gives body and a nice briny finish to her interpretation of a dirty martini. The cocktails are numbered, and like the menu, change often. Chef-driven. Small plates. Farm-to-table. Call it whatever you need to. There is nothing subtle about Scherer's food, and that's a very good thing. He's letting you know exactly who he is with each mouthful, and he's doing it at an intensity you'd expect from the lead singer of your favorite deathcore band.
