At a Michelin-Starred Restaurant, the Ingredients for Romance

When Marley Jane Brown moved to the small city of Healdsburg, Calif., for a job as a chef de partie at SingleThread restaurant, in April 2017, she had two priorities.

“I wanted to cook and learn from really great chefs,” Ms. Brown, 29, said.

A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., Ms. Brown thought that having a relationship would only distract her from those goals, so she arrived at her new home in California’s Sonoma County with no interest in dating.

The month before she relocated, she did a trial week in Healdsburg. Ms. Brown, who grew up on a farm in Belleville, Ill., that has been in her family for 150 years, had never been to California. But she quickly became seduced by the area, part of the state’s wine country, as well as the opportunity to cook at SingleThread, which combines Japanese culinary influences with a farm-to-table approach to sourcing ingredients.

Most produce used at the restaurant is grown on a nearby 24-acre farm owned and operated by its proprietors. Some of the farm’s crops were planted by Akeel Keane Shah, 33, who had been hired at SingleThread before it opened in December 2016. A graduate of the Collins College of Hospitality Management at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Mr. Shah was working as a service captain at the restaurant when Ms. Brown began her trial week in March 2017.

One night that week, Mr. Shah noticed Ms. Brown standing outside of the restaurant, near the dumpsters, after it had closed. The two had barely spoken and he is normally shy to approach women, he said. But Mr. Shah, knowing Ms. Brown didn’t have a car, offered her a ride to her hotel.

She turned him down.

“I didn’t know him,” said Ms. Brown, who instead walked a mile and a half to the hotel.

The next month, after Ms. Brown had officially relocated, the two started to develop a friendly rapport at work. Though her domain was the kitchen and his was the dining room, they would see each other going up and down the building’s three flights of stairs and make small talk.

“There’s something calming about her presence,” Mr. Shah said, that put him at ease.

A month later, in May 2017, he invited her to spend a day with him and a group of their colleagues at a favorite hangout spot on the Russian River. Mr. Shah got to the location early and, to ensure she found it, told Ms. Brown to call him when she arrived.

“I would have found my way down,” she said. “But he came to walk me all the way in.”

In a pit dug by Mr. Shah and a few others on the river bank, the group made cochinita pibil, a Mexican dish from the Yucatán Peninsula that requires marinating pork in citrus juice and spices, then wrapping it in banana leaves and cooking it for hours among hot stones.

As the food cooked, Mr. Shah and Ms. Brown placed two chairs in a shallow part of the river and got to talking about how each had developed an interest in the culinary world.

Mr. Shah, who grew up mostly in Great Falls, Va., and later in San Diego, was raised by immigrant parents. His father came to the United States from Kerala, India, and his mother, who is also Indian, from Nairobi, Kenya. His love of food, he told Ms. Brown, began as a child when he would assist his mother and maternal grandmother in the kitchen.

Ms. Brown, whose ancestors are Dutch, German and French, told him that her family farm in Illinois was also home to relatives and that the group had large communal meals several nights a week. Her immediate family and various relatives lived in separate homes on the property, but no matter who was hosting, she always helped cook, she said.

A week after their day at the river, Mr. Shah asked Ms. Brown to dinner. She accepted, thinking it was two friends grabbing a bite. But when he paid for their meal at Diavola Pizzeria & Salumeria, in Geyserville, Calif., and then took her to a scenic overlook with a view of Lake Sonoma, Ms. Brown realized that he might have had more romantic intentions.

Upon arriving at the overlook, she said her first thought was, “I gotta get out of here.”

While her guard was still up that night, in the days that followed, Ms. Brown said that she started to reflect on her developing relationship with Mr. Shah. “I had moved out here with no intention of meeting anyone, and then I meet this really amazing human within weeks,” she said, adding that Mr. Shah’s genuineness and charm soon had softened her resistance to dating.

“The second I switched my brain over, I realized, ‘This guy is awesome,’” she said.

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In early June 2017, the couple had what both consider their first date. They drove to the Barlow, an outdoor marketplace with restaurants and stores, in Sebastopol, Calif. After parking, the two bumped into their bosses, SingleThread’s husband-and-wife owners Kyle and Katina Connaughton, who were also headed to the Barlow with their children.

“It was both hilarious and awkward at the same time,” Mr. Shah said.

Later that month, Mr. Shah brought Ms. Brown a bottle of champagne for her birthday and they shared it, along with their first kiss. Soon after, they cooked their first meal as a couple: roast chicken with a pesto made using wild nettles, which they had foraged for on the Sonoma Coast.

“If you can cook together it means you’re meant for each other,” Mr. Shah said, noting that there’s a lot of silent communication needed in a kitchen.

“Our favorite thing is cooking together and having people over,” added Ms. Brown, who considers Mr. Shah as good a cook as she is.

The pair publicly revealed their romance in July 2017, at a Fourth of July event for which SingleThread and other area restaurants cooked for the community. Ms. Brown made fried chicken, while Mr. Shah smoked salmon, and when they kissed in front of their co-workers, no one was surprised. (According to the restaurant’s owners, more than a few couples have met and worked together there: “We don’t have that separation of work life and personal life,” Ms. Connaughton said.)

By that August, Ms. Brown had moved in with Mr. Shah in Healdsburg.

For Thanksgiving in 2017, they rented a house in Guerneville, Calif., and invited Mr. Shah’s family and some friends, as well as Ms. Brown’s parents, to celebrate with them. “It wasn’t a slow introduction,” Mr. Shah said jokingly of how his kin outnumbered hers. “Rather it was, ‘Here’s Akeel and his whole family.’”

A month later, Ms. Brown brought Mr. Shah to her family’s farm for Christmas.

As they continued to date, Ms. Brown’s fear that a relationship would distract from her career proved false. She worked her way up in the kitchen at SingleThread to her current role as chef de cuisine. By the time she began that job, in December 2020, the restaurant had earned three Michelin stars. In the years that followed, it received a place on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, where it was ranked No. 37 in 2021 and No. 50 this year.

Mr. Shah rose through the ranks at SingleThread, too, going from service captain to service director to dining room manager before taking his current position as the general manager of Little Saint, a plant-based restaurant opened by the Connaughtons in Healdsburg in April.

“They have both worked up to head positions in their respective areas,” Mr. Connaughton said of the couple. “They’ve supported each other to obtain these positions, and all the while not let any of that ambition and growth compromise anything about their relationship.”

Though their workdays at SingleThread were long and spent mostly apart, the pair made time to connect. “We could see each other just for a second, to give each other a smile,” Mr. Shah said, adding that family meal, the dinner served to restaurant staff, “was always a chance for us to relax and eat together.”

The couple became engaged in November 2020, on a trip to Lummi Island, off the coast of Washington State, where Mr. Shah proposed at sunset on the beach. The next year, they bought and moved into their current home in Windsor, Calif., a short drive from Healdsburg.

Before 120 guests, they were married at Ms. Brown’s family’s farm in Belleville. Denisse Shah, Mr. Shah’s sister-in-law and a Universal Life minister, officiated at the ceremony.

In a nod to the groom’s Indian roots, Mr. Shah arrived at the ceremony on horseback in a procession known as the baraat. But in a twist on the tradition, Ms. Brown rode in on a horse, too.

The bride and groom also honored his culture in their outfits, which were handmade by artisans in India. Ms. Brown wore an ivory lehenga accented in sage green, burnt orange and gold tones, which featured an onion flower, the logo of SingleThread, and a California poppy, the logo of Little Saint, in its embroidery. Mr. Shah donned an ivory suit jacket made of raw silk and sage-green trousers. His jacket had embroidered shoulders and cuffs, and was lined with a mushroom-and-floral-print fabric.

Reflecting on their relationship, Ms. Brown said it has always had an ease that is at odds with the industry that brought the couple together. “In fine dining, everything we do takes so much effort,” she said. “The connection between us was so there, and from the beginning, it just felt good and effortless.”

Added Mr. Shah, “It was an unspoken bond we had, that we just knew.”

On This Day

When Sept. 10, 2022

Where The bride’s family farm in Belleville, Ill.

Music and Menu After the ceremony, a cocktail hour featured a caviar service from The Caviar Company and New Orleans funk and soul music performed by the Funky Butt Brass Band from St. Louis. Later guests enjoyed a dinner of roast lamb prepared by the restaurant Balkan Treat Box in Webster Groves, Mo., near St. Louis.

Reassuring Raindrops Mr. Shah’s deceased paternal grandfather owned an umbrella factory, and his umbrellas were at the ready when, as if on cue, it began to rain just as guests started dancing after dinner. The couple saw it as a sign that the groom’s grandfather was with them. After the rain, a full moon rose over the dance floor.