Being together day and night isn’t for every couple, but it’s not that unusual in family businesses and it’s hard to think of a business more likely to be run by a family than a restaurant.

Deni and Patrick Reilly have guided The Majestic Grille together for more than 15 years, he in the kitchen and she in the front of the house. They’re the perfect example of an experienced team, both long involved in the restaurant community and even more so during this year of COVID.

Phillip Ashley Chocolates has ridden a rollercoaster of a pandemic

There’s Jose Gutierrez and Colleen DePete at River Oaks Restaurant. And Martha and Glenn Hays at Café 1912, who ushered in a new era of fine dining in Memphis when they opened La Tourelle in 1977. Springing from that one place:

Erling and Jaquila Jensen, at Erling Jensen: The Restaurant; Dave and Amanda Krog at Dory, opening soon; and Justin and Amy Young at Raven & Lily. There are likely other couples still operating restaurants in town who had ties to La Tourelle or, if not there, Erling’s.

But today, with Valentine’s Day on the horizon, we take a quick look at a few of the couples you might not know as much about.

Jim and Barbara Neely, Interstate Bar-B-Q

You don’t think of Memphis barbecue without thinking of Jim Neely and Interstate Bar-B-Q. But Barbara Neely was at his side from the day they opened the doors.

It was a second marriage for each of them, but they dated when they were young.

“I dated her when I came back to Memphis after the Air Force in 1959,” Neely, 83, said. “But one day I decided I was moving to California and I left. I didn’t say goodbye and didn’t speak to her for years.

“We didn’t have cellphones back then. Calling long-distance was a big deal, and it wasn’t like she was the only one I was dating.”

But she stayed on his mind. When he came back to Memphis in the 1970s, he found out she was living in New Orleans, where he frequently traveled when he was in the insurance business. He found out the street she lived on but knew nothing more.

Jim Neely learned early that the best paycheck is one he wrote to himself

“When I was there, I went to that street and there was an old man out walking. I told him I was looking for my cousin named Barbara who was from Memphis and he told me where she lived, but he said she was at work. I was fixing to leave, and he said she just works around the corner, so I went up there.”

“But there were two Barbaras there and I asked for Barbara, they told me two names and asked which one. That’s how I found out she was married, and I didn’t know her last name so I said ‘the one who lives around the corner.’”

They visited briefly and about a year later, again in New Orleans on business, he drove by her workplace and she was outside, getting ready to pick up Chinese food. He offered her a ride, found out her marriage was over, then offered to buy her a ticket home for Christmas to visit her mother — and him.

“And she came. A few months after that, I was closing up the New Orleans operation and told her, ‘If you want to come back to Memphis, I’ll be there for you. She did and we’ve been together since then.”

They opened Interstate in 1978. It’s been a family operation all along, but it started with the two of them.

“It was just us at first,” he said. “She’d take the orders and I’d be in the kitchen, and after she took the orders, she’d come back and help me.

“She’s taught me a lot. I know I can talk harshly sometimes and one day she came back in the kitchen and said, ‘You listen to me. Don’t you ever raise your voice to me in front of people.’ And she was right. If we’d ever really got going in there we would’ve torn the place up, scared everyone to death. So I shut the hell up.”

They’ve had a good life together, traveling all over the world, and these days Barbara Neely, 81, takes care of the day-to-day operations with her daughters and Jim does the outside errands.

“I don’t stand around there bossing things,” he said. “Well, if I stay in there long enough I end up trying, but it’s not worth it because if I say something to one of them, all of them jump on me.”

He says Interstate could not have happened without his wife.

“She’s always been so dedicated to what we were doing. When you marry a wife, you have to take care of them. But when you marry a helpmate, it’s the greatest thing in the world. She’s both, my wife and my helpmate.”

Jason and Rebecca Severs, Bari

They met more than 25 years ago at — of course — work. Since the days they were servers at Three Oaks Grill in Germantown, Jason and Rebecca Severs have never worked apart.

They were married in 1999.

“We’d gone to Italy, we moved to Los Angeles for a while and didn’t really like it, so we decided to get married, move back to Memphis and open our own restaurant,” said Jason, 47.

In 2002, they did. They named the restaurant Bari after the town where his mother and aunts were born, and it was a family affair long before their three sons were able to help out.

“When we first opened, our first son was two months old,” Jason said. “When Becky needed to take orders, she’d hand him to me and then she’d bring the order to the kitchen, take the baby from me and I’d cook.”

COVID has been tough on all restaurants and the seating restrictions have made it particularly difficult for smaller restaurants like Bari; being in it together has made it — and everything — easier, Rebecca said.

“The best thing about being together is that we have each other,” she said. “I have the comfort and the confidence of knowing that he’s here and he’s with me, and I’m not alone in this.”

For them, there’s no downside to working together.

“A lot of people say they couldn’t be around their spouse all day long and then go home with them, but for us it works. We have a stronger relationship all around,” said Rebecca, 45.

“We’ve spent pretty much our entire adult life working together. We brush our teeth together at night before we go to bed. It’s not like we can’t be apart, but we really enjoy being together.

“We’re a team.”

Chip and Amanda Dunham, Magnolia & May

This young couple is new to restaurant ownership — they opened Magnolia & May in East Memphis in May, mid-pandemic — but they’ve been in the kitchen together for a decade.

“We met at the Culinary Institute (of America),” Chip said. “We were friends at first, in the same classes and stuff. A couple of years in we decided to start dating, and that’s what happened.”

Amanda can fill in the gaps.

“We actually lived together in a townhouse on campus with about five more friends,” she said. “We were in classes together, and the way it worked when we were there is that you finish with the class you start with, so we’ve been working together since we were like 18 and 19.”

After they graduated — by that time she’d developed more of an interest in the front of the house and in wine and spirits — they moved to Charleston, where Amanda worked for FIG and Chip worked in a few different places.

They moved back to Memphis and went to work at The Grove Grill, owned by Chip’s parents, in 2017, and stayed there until the restaurant closed last year just as Magnolia & May was getting ready to open.

Now Jeff and Tracey Dunham are with them at the new place, so there are two couples in the restaurant.

“It’s great having my parents there, because we get to see each other every day,” said Chip, 29.

But it presents a different point of view on what the greatest challenge to working together is.

“To me it’s just trying to keep work and home separate,” Chip said. “If there’s an argument or anything at work, you want to try real hard not to bring it home.”

Day Tripper: Bread & Butter Bistro in Batesville

For Amanda, 28, it’s more practical: “The biggest problem is childcare. Everyone is here, we all work the same hours. But it works out somehow.”

The thing that matters is mutual success.

“We have a similar goal,” Amanda said. “Day in and day out, we’re striving toward the same thing. I guess that lots of couples want the same thing in general, but for us, it’s not just at home but in our careers.”

Frank and Ellen Grisanti, Frank Grisanti’s Italian Restaurant

Frank Grisanti’s Italian Restaurant has been in Embassy Suites for 36 years, and was open at Poplar and I-240 for a few years before it moved.

But Ellen Grisanti was in the restaurant with her husband even before that.

“In 1973, I was pregnant and Johnny (Grisanti, Frank’s uncle) and Frank opened Grisanti’s on Airways. I was teaching, and I’d go home to change and then go to the restaurant. Delores (John Grisanti’s wife) would come up, too.”

There are a lot of Grisantis around, and the former Ellen Larkin met another one before she met her husband, the man for her.

“I married the right one,” she said. “But first I dated his brother Ronnie.”

It happened like this, as Frank, 77, recalls.

“We met one Saturday morning when I got a call from my brother Ronnie. He said ‘I need you to come help me out, I’m at Jimmy Webb’s (a bar on Madison).’

“It was about 10:30, maybe 11 in the morning and Ellen, Ronnie and another couple were sitting at the bar and Ronnie said, ‘I need you to pay my tab,’ and that’s how we met.”

Ellen and Ronnie had been with the other couple, who had a boat, the night before. They took it on the Mississippi River and got stuck on a sandbar.

“I said ‘Y’all are going to have to push it off’ and Ronnie said ‘You’re going to get out and help,’ and I knew right then he wasn’t the man for me,” she said.

But she was just hours away from meeting his brother, the man she’s now been married to for 51 years.

They were engaged about three years later at a bar called T.J.’s in Midtown, where Ronnie Milsap was singing, and married in 1970.

Ellen, originally from Boston, was recruited to teach at the Memphis Oral School for the Deaf right after she received her master’s degree at Smith College in 1964. She taught for 30 years, helping out at the restaurant most of the time. She’s worked lunches since she retired from teaching.

“I greet, I meet and I seat,” she said.

Frank and their son Larkin take care of the rest of it.

“Frank gets to the restaurant every day by 8 in the morning. His entire energy is devoted to what needs to be done and what he can do to make it better. He lives and breathes the restaurant,” Ellen said.

What makes their work relationship work is the same thing that’s made their marriage long.

“I admire Frank tremendously, that’s obvious, and Frank is, for whatever reason, proud of me,” Ellen said.

“The most important thing about working together is you’re able to share ideas,” Frank said. “Something may happen during the day at the restaurant and we’re too busy to stop, so when we come home, we have the opportunity to sit down, have a glass of wine and discuss it.”

Ellen says it’s good to be half of a close couple.

“When you’re first engaged you’re together all the time, then you get married and most people go different ways during the day and don’t really know what’s going on with the other person,” she said. “With us, we see what’s going on. We know what problems, what successes, what joys are going on, and we share it.”

Frank started working at Grisanti’s on Main, his grandparents’ restaurant, when he was 13; he was the garlic bread boy and he’s been in the restaurant business all his life. He likes having his son working with him and his wife by his side.

“I can’t even think of a ‘worst’ part of it,” he said. “We might get a little irritated now and then because she does it one way and I do it another. That’s nothing. It’s not anything you can call worst.”

Yong and Wah Hu, New Asia, Germantown

They’ve known each other their whole lives. They went to elementary school in China together and he sat behind her. He would pester her to get her attention, and one day she stabbed him in the leg with a pencil; the graphite tip remained for years.

In high school, Wah’s mother was Yong’s teacher. She’d ride her bike to meet her mother, and the elementary school friends became reacquainted — not long before he left to come to the United States.

But when Yong went to Los Angeles to cook, Wah stayed in his heart.

He returned to China in 1987 to wed his bride, then brought her back to the states. They stayed in Los Angeles one year, then moved to Memphis.

In 1988 the couple purchased the former Joy Young restaurant in Eastgate with Yong Hu’s brothers and changed the name to New Asia; it later moved to Covington Pike and later still, to Summer Avenue.

In 2005, Yong, 51, and Wah, 50, opened New Asia in Germantown.

They’ve worked together almost every day since coming to Memphis. It’s a good life, with three grown children, a successful business, and a lifelong love.

“It’s nice. I have known him all my life,” Wah said.