Little Fish homeowners faucet Mariscos Jaliscos, Quarter Sheets for wedding ceremony

It wasn’t love at first something for Anna Sonenshein when she met Niki Vahle whereas working at Son of a Gun in 2018. Rather, it began with a feud.

Sonenshein labored as a bunch, Vahle as a sous chef. She largely ignored him.

“I was fed up with the kitchen thinking they were better than front-of-house,” she advised me, on speakerphone, from the house they now share. “It’s such a common thing in restaurants, and I hate it.”

But, like all good star-crossed tales, the pair fell in love.

“And I beat all that out of Niki,” Sonenshein mentioned.

“She did,” he known as from a distance, as he wrangled one in all their two canines, Chicken. “We don’t tolerate any of that now in our restaurant.”

The restaurant in query is the Michelin Guide-inducted Little Fish, which the couple began as a pop-up out of their kitchen window in 2020 and has expanded to 2 places: Echo Park and Melrose Hill.

With Little Fish, Sonenshein and Vahle unapologetically combine enterprise, pleasure, household, friendship and meals.

It is smart, then, that their greatest partnership up to now — an April 18 wedding ceremony — could be a food-first, ceremony-second affair. About 120 company sardined into the modest yard of Sonenshein’s Santa Monica childhood residence, with a veritable who’s who of the L.A. restaurant scene doing double obligation as attendees and distributors.

As the groups behind Mariscos Jaliscos and El Ruso arrange vans out entrance, Aaron Lindell and Hannah Ziskin of Quarter Sheets conversation-hopped, and Kae Whalen, the L.A. darling wine Substacker (who additionally runs Little Fish’s wine program), snaked by way of the gang along with her pint-sized pomeranian underneath one arm.

In this darkish period for L.A. eating places, the place financial fears, fires and ICE have led to numerous closures, Sonenshein and Vahle have made some extent of constructing neighborhood amongst restaurant staff and collaborators.

“When we were starting our businesses, none of us had any knowledge of the back-end stuff,” Ziskin advised me. “We figured it out together.”

She and Lindell turned their Quarter Sheets pop-up right into a brick-and-mortar in 2022. Little Fish adopted the identical trajectory a couple of months later.

“Niki and Anna will answer any question I have,” Ziskin mentioned. “We talk business, money. It’s so rare to have that: friends in the same position who deeply understand what you do.”

Vahle and Sonenshein seek advice from their associates who additionally began meals companies throughout the pandemic as “our class.”

“We’re peers, not competition,” Vahle mentioned. “We share notes; we share everything.”

In January 2025, when the Palisades and Eaton fires ripped by way of the town, these associates have been those Sonenshein and Vahle known as first as they created a network of almost 200 restaurants to supply, cook dinner and ship meals to displaced households and first responders.

As the occasion waited for Sonenshein and Vahle to look, company sipped his and hers wine picks by Whalen: a Domaine Derain “Landre” 2023 for Vahle (“A Niki wine reminds us that beauty, precision and transcendence are possible”), and a Le Mazel “Couvée Paulou” 2024 for Sonenshein (“An Anna wine is often fruity, vibrant, easy to adore and adores easily”).

Meanwhile, like every good father of the bride, Raphe Sonenshein held court docket on the grazing desk, encouraging anybody in earshot to pile plates with charcuterie, taralli and gildas curated by Catalina Flores (Panhead LA) and Ryan Vesper (Gourmet Imports).

The mom of the bride, Phyllis Amaral, shepherded members of the family to a handful of front-row folding chairs. Everyone else would spend the evening standing, balancing plates and, inevitably, spilling some wine.

“Very creative wedding,” mentioned one good friend of the household.

The couple made their entrance — arm in arm — with Sonenshein in a tea-length, corseted robe and Vahle in a bespoke swimsuit the shade of a Liguria olive.

During their vows, Sonenshein joked that marriage isn’t so scary once you already share six LLCs.

Then, they sealed their latest contract with a kiss.

The applause had barely subsided earlier than a collective starvation took over.

Mariscos Jalisco despatched out trays of shrimp tacos — a nod to the couple’s seafood origin story — however company nonetheless beelined for the truck, forming a line down the block.

Next door at El Ruso, proprietor Walter Soto chopped carne asada whereas his spouse, Julia, took orders: two chile colorado; three birria; no onions, please. Their preteen daughter, Suri, performed within the entrance seat of the truck.

“For us, it was something very special to know that we were going to serve food on such a special day to someone so special to us,” Soto mentioned. “I remember seeing Niki several times eating at our food truck during the difficult times of ICE raids. [Then] we had to close our truck for three or four months. Anna and Niki came to my house with a check to help us endure that really bad time. That’s how we met them.”

As for the cake, attempt two. Both by Ziskin.

“I would have been offended if they hadn’t asked me,” she mentioned.

The first was a Quarter Sheets menu basic: olive oil chiffon with contemporary passionfruit and bay leaf-infused custard. Ziskin additionally created what she calls a “chef-y” mixture: rhubarb with pistachio chiffon and mascarpone custard infused with orange peel.

Before transferring the afterparty to Santa Monica’s Not No Bar (co-owner Conner Mitchell can also be one in all Little Fish’s fishermen), the music lower briefly for speeches.

Julia Sonenshein, the bride’s sister and a typically meals author, admitted that she couldn’t separate their love story from a shared love of cooking.

“For these two, the idea that anyone would go without food, whether it’s friends who’ve stopped by for a coffee table meal or families who lost their kitchens in wildfires, is an unconscionable possibility they won’t accept,” she mentioned. “And so they find a way to make sure all of us are fed.”

And what about Sonenshein and Vahle — did somebody remind them to eat?

Vahle didn’t hesitate. “How could we forget?”