Bride finally says ‘yes' to engagement — after her boyfriend proposed 43 times: ‘I just knew she was the one'
After seven years and 42 rejections, a woman finally accepted her boyfriend's proposal.
Sarah Wintrip, 38, has finally said 'yes' to her long-term patient partner, Luke Wintrip, 36 — on his 43rd attempt.
The couple, who tied the knot on May 17, 2025, have shocked many people with their unusual love story.
Sarah, 38, from Chelmsford, Essex, initially turned down Luke's first proposal in 2018 after just six months of dating. Both had recently emerged from serious relationships and, despite being in love, Sarah wasn't ready for another commitment so soon — especially one involving her three daughters.
'I didn't expect it,' she recalled of the first proposal, which took place during a romantic horse ride in Jamaica. 'I loved him, but I didn't want to say 'yes' to something I later retracted. I wanted to make sure with kids and everything going on that it was right. Luke said 'Okay, fine, but I'm going to keep asking you,' she told Kennedy News.
Luke, a 36-year-old tattooist, was undeterred. With each 'no,' he grew more creative — proposing in abandoned castles, hiring musicians, and staging candlelit dinners.
One of the most elaborate proposals happened in Prague, where Luke transformed a deserted castle into a fairy-tale setting, complete with chocolates, champagne, and fairy lights. But even then, Sarah rejected him.
'I knew it was early, but I just knew she was the one,' Luke said. 'My friends said to me, 'You're trying to beat her down,' but it wasn't that. I wanted to prove to her how much I want this, and I hoped one day the girls would look at it and go 'Well, if Luke loves Mum that much, I need to find someone that loves me that much'.'
Clips of Luke's repeated proposals — including one at a restaurant where Sarah shyly buried her head in her hands, and another on a busy street — went viral on TikTok. The caption '43 proposals and now we are getting married in two weeks' attracted thousands of viewers.
Sarah finally said yes in 2023 after telling Luke to pause the proposals and wait for the right moment. That moment came in Greenwich, London — where the eastern and western hemispheres meet to form the basis of the Greenwich Mean Time time zone — with a hired busker playing all her favorite songs.
'When he proposed, he said, 'This is the center of the world and you are the center of my world and I want you to marry me'. He finally won my heart,' she recounted.
Now happily married, Sarah reflects on her decision with no regrets and encourages other women to trust their own timing: 'If they're the one, they'll put in the effort. You don't have to say 'yes' if you're not ready. You can say, 'not right now.''
'I think he probably should get a Guinness World Record. I am grateful he persisted for so long,' Sarah joked.
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Eater
31 minutes ago
- Eater
Rice Cakes Can Do Anything
is a senior reporter at covering restaurant trends, home cooking advice, and all the food you can't escape on your TikTok FYP. Previously, she worked for Bon Appétit and VICE's Munchies. In 2023, the Los Angeles izakaya Budonoki, then just a few weeks old, decided to 'dress up' as a different kind of restaurant for Halloween. For one night, the Japanese restaurant transformed into an Italian trattoria with Negroni slushes, arancini, and checkered tablecloths. Someone on staff offered the pun 'Budo-gnocchi,' recalls co-owner Eric Bedroussian. 'We were like, wait, that's actually really good.' Nobody in the kitchen had expertise in making pasta and no one had much interest in making gnocchi from scratch, so the team reached for something more convenient: Korean rice cakes, also known as tteok. Like gnocchi, rice cakes offer a bouncy chew, especially the long cylindrical rice cakes that the restaurant uses. (Tteok can also be found in flatter rounds that are sliced on the diagonal.) The team steamed the rice cakes to soften them, then seared them to create a crisp outer layer. Sauteed mushrooms, a dashi-butter pan sauce, and Parmigiano-Reggiano rounded out the pasta-like vibe. The Budo-gnocchi was 'so incredibly well-received,' Bedroussian says, that it had to become a part of the permanent menu. It hit the notes the restaurant was going for with every other dish. 'It's comforting and it fills you up if you've been drinking a lot,' he says. Once a happy accident, Budo-gnocchi has since become a signature dish at the restaurant, which was named an Eater Best New Restaurant in 2024. The dish has since evolved into a loose template, changing with the whims of the kitchen. The restaurant might upgrade it by finishing with black truffle shavings, or bringing in corn and tomatoes in the summer. 'It can be whatever we want it to be,' Bedroussian says. As Korean cuisine gains popularity across the United States, rice cakes — a popular street food — have established themselves as a promising ingredient for chefs cooking both inside and outside Korean cuisine. While you'll find them cast as other types of noodles (Sunny Lee's baked ziti-like rice cakes at New York City's Sunn's, for example, or chef Beverly Kim's tteokbokki pad Thai at Chicago's Parachute HiFi), chefs especially like the way their playful, chewy texture makes them a natural substitute for gnocchi. This idea isn't entirely novel; in a 2006 New York Times review of New York's Momofuku Ssäm Bar, Pete Wells recommended the rice cakes topped with Sichuan pork ragu and whipped tofu as 'dead ringers for gnocchi.' Chefs in Korea have been working on a similar culinary track for a little while now too. Traditionally, restaurants and street stalls generally use tteok to make tteokbokki, in which the rice cakes are simmered in sauce that's slightly sweet, spicy, and fiery red from gochujang. In recent years, they've been riffing with rosé tteokbokki, which adds cream to the typical tteokbokki base, inspired by both the Italian rosé sauce and Korean-style carbonara. 'Italian food in general has become more popular in Korea,' says bar owner and forthcoming cookbook author Irene Yoo. Given that Korean-style carbonara is made with cream and served with ham or peas, breaking from Italian tradition, rosé tteokbokki is 'an interpretation of another interpretation,' she says. The rice cakes at Sunn's are topped with mozzarella cheese. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet/Eater NY Across the U.S., rice cakes have recently transcended pasta dishes altogether. In New York City alone, there's the culinary boundary-blurring rice cake fundido at Haenyeo; the nacho-like chopped cheese rice cakes at Nowon; rice cakes bulking up galbi bourguignon alongside potatoes at Sinsa; and blanketed with mornay sauce until they resemble gratin at Gurume. At Yoo's Orion Bar in Brooklyn, rice cakes also turn sweet, morphing into churros: deep-fried until puffy and crispy on the outside, then tossed in cinnamon sugar and served with cream cheese-makgeolli dip. 'I grew up in LA, so I definitely had a lot of churros growing up,' Yoo says. While testing deep-fried rice cakes, 'I immediately thought of that as a taste memory.' For chef Nick Wong of Houston's new 'modern Asian American diner,' Agnes and Sherman, a dish of rice cakes with beef ragu filled the slot for a 'comforting, saucy starch' on the menu, since there's no pasta. It also represents a 'kind of 'if you know, you know' situation,' he says. Wong spent years cooking at Ssäm Bar, so the dish is in part a reference to the ragu rice cakes there, though with pork in place of beef because 'it's Texas,' Wong says, and to account for Houston's Muslim population. More specific to Houston, the dish has another reference: The Korean braised goat and dumplings, also made with rice cakes, was the signature dish at Chris Shepherd's now-closed Underbelly; the dish was beloved for the way it evoked the foods of many different cultures. With a sauce featuring Korean gochujang and doenjang, West African uda pepper, and Mexican chile de árbol, Wong's rendition is emblematic of Houston, where, he says, 'it's hard to tell where one thing ends and another thing begins.' When it comes to his rice cake dish, Houstonians 'just get it,' he says. With all its iterations, Budo-gnocchi is a 'chameleon' too, Bedroussian says. For a recent collab dinner with Indian sports bar Pijja Palace — an Eater Best New Restaurant that's known for its malai rigatoni (pasta with a creamy tomato masala) — the two restaurants served malai Budo-gnocchi. It's a little bit of everything: Italian, Indian, Korean, all through the lens of an LA riff on a Japanese izakaya. Between all those influences, rice cakes are in the middle, bridging the gap. Sign up for Eater's newsletter The freshest news from the food world every day Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Eater
31 minutes ago
- Eater
It's the Ramen Burger's World
is a senior reporter at covering restaurant trends, home cooking advice, and all the food you can't escape on your TikTok FYP. Previously, she worked for Bon Appétit and VICE's Munchies. Keizo Shimamoto's ramen burger made the news before he sold a single one. In 2013, Shimamoto had become fixated on burgers with fried pucks of ramen for buns, which he encountered while studying ramen in Tokyo. After tinkering with the dish, he announced on his popular ramen review site Go Ramen (which he styles Go Ramen!) that he'd briefly bring it to Smorgasburg, New York's then two-year-old food festival. It blew up online, earning Shimamoto an invite to appear on Good Morning America. By the time he made it to Smorgasburg later that day, the ramen burger was primed to become an icon. 'In my mind, I was just going to do this one-time event — that's it,' he says. He was wrong. Even though Shimamoto didn't have the right grills or the proper setup, and it was raining that first day, the burger was a hit. It was a sight to behold with layers of scallions and arugula, and its secret shoyu glaze, packed between Sun Noodle ramen. Over 200 people lined up for just 150 burgers. The next time he showed up at Smorgasburg, he sold 360 burgers in three hours, leading to a residency for the whole summer. From there, it just kept going. In 2014, Shimamoto leveraged the burger's success into a New York City ramen shop, Ramen Co. By 2015, he was selling 1,200 to 1,500 burgers at each Smorgasburg appearance. In 2016 — the same year Red Robin launched its own rendition on the burger — Shimamoto opened Ramen Shack, where he served the ramen burger and much more. 'I wasn't creating it to have it go viral. The ramen burger is kind of a mash up of me.' 'I wasn't creating it to have it go viral,' Shimamoto says. He just wanted to put his own spin on a concept he enjoyed. The ramen burgers he ate in Japan were usually made with pork, but having grown up eating In-N-Out in Los Angeles, Shimamoto saw burgers as synonymous with beef. As a Japanese American, he adds, 'The ramen burger is kind of a mash up of me.' The first time he nailed the sauce, he recalls, he jumped with joy in his living room. When the ramen burger hit Smorgasburg that first rainy Saturday, he couldn't have predicted the lines, let alone the rise of social media or the very idea of viral hype food. Instagram was still mostly a venue for collating and sharing experiences rather than the marketing and promotion tool it is today. The dining public was somewhat easier to entice. In that context, the ramen burger's impact was surprising. It brought about 'this sheeple effect,' says Smorgasburg co-founder Eric Demby. 'Trying it and obtaining it [became] the goal.' Following the KFC Double Down (launched in 2010), internet sensations like the Turbaconducken, and the rise of the Cronut (released in May 2013), the food world was on the cusp of a major overhaul. Right when social media was starting to turn dining experiences into social currency, the ramen burger's novelty created a fervor. Whether he planned to or not, Shimamoto helped usher in a pessimistic new age of food, one in which producers developed formulas to guarantee social media success. The ramen burger became the poster child for a flood of mashups that had gone and would continue to go mainstream: the sushi burrito, the sushi pizza, the sushi burger, the spaghetti doughnut, the scallion pancake burrito, the Yorkshire burrito, birria ramen, birria pizza, and so on. Judging by what makes it to my feed today, these techniques still work. We might see fewer ramen burgers now, but we're still living in the ramen burger's world. Before 2013, the rising stars at Smorgasburg were operations like Salvatore Bklyn ricotta, Mast Brothers chocolate, and Mighty Quinn's barbecue. 'A lot of vendors that came through were taking off,' Demby says. The festival was about vendors getting creative with food that you couldn't get anywhere else. In that sense, the ramen burger fit right in. Prior to its appearance, Smorgasburg didn't have a burger vendor, Demby recalls; burgers were too commonplace. 'And then the ramen burger came along and we were like, There's our burger,' Demby says. 'It's not a burger burger.' But Shimamoto's work also represented a break. Most other vendors traded in the sincere-seeming foods of the artisanal, hipster moment. This was the era of 'farm-to-table' dining and back-to-the-land authenticity, which, at times, could be precious to the point of parody. 'There was this focus on how you made it,' Demby says. While Shimamoto invested the same sort of time and attention into his product, the ramen burger's quality and flavor were almost beside the point for many consumers. Mike Chau, one of the city's original food Instagrammers, sees the ramen burger as a turning point; the burger's success led to an 'escalation' of people not only waiting in lines but also 'getting food for the sake of posting about it,' he says. Instagram, which had launched in 2010 and hit its first 100 million users in 2013, was beginning a period of rapid growth. (Chau distinctly remembers the ramen burger's first weekend, but with his wife days just away from giving birth, 'the line was so long that we just gave up,' he says. If you live in NYC, you probably recognize that kid: Chau runs the popular account @foodbabyny.) With its ability to draw customers primarily interested in posting online, the ramen burger quickly began to outshine its neighbors. 'A lot of people came to Smorgasburg for the ramen burger and then they discovered the rest of Smorgasburg,' Demby says. Other vendors took notice. It became obvious that it was crucial to stand out from the competition, both in person and online. 'People all started to look for their shot to make something like [the ramen burger],' Chau says. A few years later, the raindrop cake debuted at the festival. The ramen burger changed Smorgasburg — and Smorgasburg changed food culture. As eating increasingly became an activity and an aesthetic promoted through social media, people began to chase culinary spectacle over substance outside of food festivals. Virality became a new way of engaging with food in nearly all contexts. Ruby Tandoh writes in her forthcoming book All Consuming that the rise of Instagram 'allowed you to bypass thinking altogether and just look.' The ramen burger's formula for a viral food still holds true. Writer and pastry chef Tanya Bush recently theorized in i-D that the first step toward virality is manipulation (you give a familiar food a tantalizing new appearance) and the second hybridization (you mash it up with another food that people already know). Nail those two steps, as the ramen burger did, and you increase the likelihood of a dish that people will make an effort to seek out. It may be cynical to paint purveyors as shrewd manipulators of the attention economy and diners as disloyal clout-chasers. But it's the game. No one is really fooled anymore. Viral food trends don't seem as organic now, according to Allyson Reedy, author of The Phone Eats First Cookbook, a compilation of 'social media's best recipes' published earlier this year. Unlike 2013, when foods like the ramen burger could make the news basically unintentionally, viral food is now more clearly 'a manipulation,' Reedy says. 'It's more strategic and intentional.' Perhaps that's why the ramen burger became so polarizing. Before the dish was even a year old, it was already drawing ire along with imitators. By 2025, Taste Atlas, the publication whose food rankings are calibrated for social media engagement, put the ramen burger at No. 7 on its list of the 'worst rated foods in the world,' right between jellied eels and blood pancakes. It still routinely makes the rounds on Reddit's r/stupidfood forum. Some consumers decided the ramen burger was the moment internet food culture jumped the shark (even while its contemporary, the Cronut, skated by on Western esteem for French pastry culture). Shimamoto himself has been let down by social media-famous food. In the early days of Instagram, 'even if [food] was [made] for the 'gram, people were still putting their heart into the flavors,' he says. Now, 'it's really hard to judge' what he sees on social media, Shimamoto says. 'If you can get remembered for something, you'll have customers for a long time.' Shimamoto's cooking was always about more than virality. While the novelty of the ramen burger was the bun made of noodles, the 'heart and soul' was its shoyu glaze, he explains. 'That juice from the meat and the sauce, and then that texture from the noodles, is really what makes it.' While the burger might have gotten people in the door at Shimamoto's restaurants, he hoped to flex his broader culinary skills on bowls of ramen too — something on which he was an expert, as his blog proved. In Serious Eats, Sho Spaeth once described Ramen Shack as 'the most exciting place to eat ramen in the United States,' though the ramen burger's success 'always risked occluding [Shimamoto's] true skill as a ramen-making savant with seemingly perfect taste-memory.' In 2019, Shimamoto closed the New York City location of Ramen Shack. In 2022, he closed the Ramen Shack location in Orange County, California, as well, citing staffing changes and personal health issues. While he says that he never grew to resent the ramen burger, the business around it could be 'overwhelming at times, with everyone trying to get a piece of the pie.' Smorgasburg's approach to choosing vendors has also crystallized over the past decade-plus. Food that works at Smorgasburg has to be good, Demby says, but it also has what he calls a 'moment of theater.' 'You've got to get known for something,' he says. 'If you can get remembered for something, you'll have customers for a long time.' The ramen burger has much more competition now, but interest in it has remained relatively steady since 2017 (though vastly decreased from its 2013 to 2016 heyday). 'I didn't close my shops because I thought that the ramen burger was no longer sellable,' Shimamoto says. Whenever he posts the ramen burger on Instagram now, commenters tend to reminisce about the good old days. And whenever his kids or friends request one, he'll make the ramen burger — just on a smaller scale now. 'To this day, it's still great,' he says. Sign up for Eater's newsletter The freshest news from the food world every day Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Black America Web
31 minutes ago
- Black America Web
Drake Pelted With Toilet Tissue & Water Bottles During Amsterdam & London Concerts
Source: Simone Joyner / Getty / Drake Videos have hit the internet showing fans pelting Drake with water bottles and toilet tissue while he continues to perform overseas. According to multiple reports and TikTok videos, not all fans attending the Canadian Hip-Hop star's shows are happy with the 6 God, as some are throwing objects at the rapper. A post on X, formerly Twitter, claims the bad behavior is due to Drake not delivering a performance worthy of the price of admission. Drake, standing on the stage, hyping the crowd while asking them to sing his songs, is not what folks paid for, and is what is leading to fans chucking water bottles and toilet paper. We care about your data. See our privacy policy. In one of the videos, Drake gets hit in the face with a bottle, while in others, you can see toilet paper being thrown and landing behind the 'God's Plan' crafter with his team quickly picking up the tossed items. There haven't been any videos of Drake threatening to stop the show if the dangerous behavior continues during his performances. So he seems to be taking it in stride and not punishing everyone for a handful of people acting stupid. Drake's touring abroad has been in the headlines lately, especially following his battle and loss to Kendrick Lamar. During some of his performances, Drizzy co-signed 'f*** Kendrick Lamar' chants. Throwing objects at performers has become an alarming trend, and we wish fans would stop, as someone can seriously get hurt. You can see reactions to Drake being blessed with TP and water bottles in the gallery below. Drake Pelted With Toilet Tissue & Water Bottles During Amsterdam & London Concerts was originally published on
