They bear a striking likeness to each other, two young men, both ruggedly handsome with matching stubble and wide, irresistible grins

They bear a striking likeness to each other, two young men, both ruggedly handsome with matching stubble and wide, irresistible grins. 

No wonder they both captured the heart of the same woman: .But only one of them is going to be waiting at the altar for Meghan on 19 May – and it’s not Cory Vitiello, a celebrity chef in his home city of Toronto and the person she was dating just weeks before she met . 

Here the Mail’s David Jones uncovers the untold story of Meghan’s secretive two-year affair with Cory, who helped lift her spirits after her first marriage had broken down.

Through exclusive interviews with the man himself, his mother and Meghan’s inner circle during her years in Toronto, when she was filming the series Suits, we’ve discovered just how close she came to marrying Cory, the real reason their relationship faltered and how, through him, she gained access to the loftiest levels of society – and, ultimately, the high-powered friends who would introduce her to the prince…

As an avowed ‘foodie’, whose slender figure belies her weakness for calorie-laden dishes, Meghan Markle loves to dine out.And during the summer of 2014, she penned a gushing review on her new lifestyle blog in praise of a small but fashionable restaurant near her Toronto neighbourhood.

With its salmon pink walls, tattooed and T-shirted waiters, and potent ‘killer cocktails’, The Harbord Room was a magnet for the young, artsy set, and Meghan – who ate there with fellow cast members from the television series Suits – drooled over its ‘much-lauded burger’, saying it was the best thing she’d sampled from the already impressive menu.

The actress expressed equally unbridled admiration for the restaurant’s co-owner, Canadian celebrity chef Cory Vitiello, who had been taught to cook as a child by his Italian grandmother and started his first catering business from his home, in a sleepy provincial town, when he was just 15.

‘And maybe that’s part of it – the small-town charm and moral compass of someone who doesn’t come from the big city, but dreams big thoughts and makes them happen – that makes his food so approachable yet inspired,’ said Meghan, proclaiming Vitiello, then 35, her ‘very favourite’ chef.

Yet it wasn’t only his culinary skill that impressed her.What she omitted to say, in her eloquent paean, was that she was falling headlong in love with Vitiello, whose Scandinavian and Latin genes (his mother’s ancestry is Swedish, and his father, a retired PE teacher, is of Italian descent) had combined to produce a stubble-jawed Adonis.

That summer, they began an intense relationship that would last for almost two years, causing many in their circle to believe it would lead to the altar.

In fact, when Meghan published that glowing review on her now-closed blog, The Tig, their romance might have been advancing apace.And when she asked Vitiello, in a Q&A-style interview accompanying the critique, how he relaxed of an evening – by eating ‘whatever my loving girlfriend brings me’, he replied – they were probably sharing an intimate joke.

Dropping hints about her romantic status on social media is something of a trademark for Meghan, who first indicated that rumours about her love for Prince Harry were true by posting an image of two spooning, smiley-faced bananas – a favourite fruit of his.

Certainly, the timing of that internet post in 2014 fits with what I’ve learned about Meghan’s secretive affair with the chef.For the review appeared on 10 July, 2014, and – in an exclusive interview – his mother Joanne Vitiello told me her son’s relationship with Meghan began around that time, after Meghan visited The Harbord Room with friends from Suits.

When she returned to the restaurant to celebrate her 33rd birthday with her castmates, on 4 August, 2014, her feelings for the tall, athletically built Cory were plain for all to see.

The full inside story of Meghan’s courtship with Vitiello – which began a year after her divorce from film producer Trevor Engelson and ended shortly before she met Harry – has never before been told.Nor, beyond the names of her favourite haunts, do we know much about Meghan’s life in Toronto; a city she has called her ‘adopted home’, having lived there for six years, between 2011 and 2017, for the most part anonymously, in an unpretentious clapboard house, in an unremarkable street.

However, after interviewing numerous sources in Canada, including Cory’s parents, and speaking to the chef himself (a commendably honourable man who has resisted colossal offers to sell his story) I have pieced together the intriguing prequel to the royal love match.

It is integral to Meghan’s story for many reasons.

Not least because it explains how the actress, who arrived in Toronto as an unknown and left last November as the world’s most Googled woman, positioned herself – some might say rather calculatingly – in the elevated social milieu which led to her being introduced to Harry.

Rather like the film Sliding Doors, which shows how differently people’s lives would turn out but for a small twist of fate, it also gives us a picture of the wildly contrasting future that would have awaited Meghan had she married Cory Vitiello.

His mother certainly left me in little doubt that she would have been thrilled to have Meghan for a daughter-in-law.She was effusive in her praise for Meghan, who spent the Christmas of 2015 with the Vitiello family, staying for several days at their modern home in Brantford, west of Toronto. And when I asked Mrs Vitiello whether Cory and Meghan’s relationship had been very serious, her reply was emphatic.

‘Absolutely!

And we are very fond of her,’ declared Mrs Vitiello, very deliberately using the present tense. ‘She is a lovely, lovely woman. Very smart, very bright, very caring. She’s a warm personality, very sincere. We very much enjoyed the time we spent with her.

She fitted very well into our family. The Royal Family, and Britain, is very lucky to have her.’

Such is her worldwide renown today, that the velocity of Meghan’s rise is difficult to contemplate.Seven years ago, when she landed the part of legal assistant Rachel Zane in a new cable TV series, Suits, which was to be shot in Toronto (because Canada gives generous tax credits to TV and movie producers), she was still a virtual unknown. 

Her most recent screen appearances had been minor roles in two forgettable films – one a gallows-humour comedy, Get Him To The Greek, starring Russell Brand – and she was one among legions of anonymous actors striving for stardom in a remote, cliquey and, during the long winter, forbiddingly cold city.

There was no guarantee Suits would take off, but the prospect that she might at last break into the big time thrilled Meghan. After all, she was approaching 30 and knew there wouldn’t be too many more opportunities to attain the recognition she’d sought since girlhood.

For this naturally gregarious woman, however, loneliness was her biggest enemy during those early days, 2,500 miles away from her home city of Los Angeles, where she had many friends, and had lived for the past six years with Trevor Engelson, her soulmate and mentor since her early 20s.

Knowing they would be apart for a prolonged period, perhaps they felt a need to affirm their commitment to one another.For in September 2011, Meghan flew to Jamaica to marry Engelson in a laid-back ceremony at a beach resort, accompanied by exuberant beach games and fuelled by copious amounts of rum punch and Red Stripe lager. The couple were also carried aloft in chairs, in accordance with Trevor’s Jewish faith. 

Afterwards, they would fly the five hours between LA and Toronto for trysts whenever possible.There were also many Skype and FaceTime calls. However, her husband’s career as a Hollywood film producer and agent was also advancing apace, so their hectic schedules restricted these liaisons, placing the relationship under strain.

Matters were made worse because, when they did manage to snatch some time together, it was clear to Trevor that Meghan was changing.Habits that had once endeared him to her, such as rolling up for appointments late, in unironed clothes, now annoyed her. Starring for the first time in a TV series seemed to be turning her head, and she found a new circle of friends among her fellow actors, so that – though she had often declared that she couldn’t envisage life without Trevor – he began to feel like a spare part.

There wasn’t anything exciting about Meghan’s new working environment, however.Acting on a primetime series might sound glamorous, but Suits is largely filmed in a grim, concrete hangar on a former military base on the outskirts of Toronto, and she would have to mooch around there for hour upon tedious hour, waiting to be called on set.

Home for Meghan was a three-bedroom house in Seaton Village – an old neighbourhood with an English feel now popular with bohemian media types – where she did all she could to create an air of familiarity. She redecorated the house, 10 Yarmouth Road, in light colours, hung paintings, installed modern furniture, and filled it with flowers so it would resemble the cosy, yellow-painted Californian bungalow she and Trevor had shared off Sunset Boulevard. 

Meghan even brought her white Audi SUV from California to Toronto – a 40-hour drive away – and added a sense of permanence to the move by taking household appliances like her well-loved food mixer with her.

For company, she installed her two adored dogs in the house.She would take Guy, a beagle, and Bogart, a Labrador-shepherd cross, both acquired from an LA rescue pound, for long walks in the snowbound local park, returning to cook supper for one.

‘She lived here very quietly, at least until Harry came on the scene.It was only after that when she really began to have friends round, and they had a big party,’ her former next-door neighbour, Bill Kapetanos, told me.

The 75-year-old Greek-born retired restaurant manager says he became ‘a sort of uncle’ to Meghan. He chatted with her over the garden fence and did odd jobs for her, such as fixing the swing door to her rear garage when it got jammed.Meghan also met his grandchildren (leading him to the opinion that ‘she’ll make a wonderful mum’), and when her mother, Doria Ragland, came to stay, Mr Kapetanos says she made a point of thanking him for looking after her ‘angel’. Meghan was surely grateful for his avuncular kindness when, in August 2013, just 21 months after their wedding, she and Engelson were divorced.

The court papers cite ‘irreconcilable differences’. As I will reveal in next week’s instalment of this series, however, this legal jargon doesn’t begin to tell the poignant and acrimonious story of their break-up.During this difficult interlude, Meghan also lost touch with some of her old LA friends, who felt Trevor had been badly treated and took his side – most notably Ninaki Priddy, whom she had known since they were two and was once like a sister to her.

Meghan has described how her TV show’s cast became her ‘surrogate family’.She forged a particularly close bond with two of her co-stars, Gina Torres, 48, and Sarah Rafferty, 45, and these two women – whom she called her ‘Suits sisters’ – no doubt comforted her as she adjusted to life as a divorcée. 

Sometimes, after a long day at the studio, Gina would cook supper for her (Meghan adored her picadillo, a Latin American-style hash, which they washed down with white burgundy).They also began frequenting Toronto’s many stylish bars and restaurants, and it was on one such evening that Meghan met the chef Cory Vitiello.

The received wisdom is that she was the more famous half of this good-looking couple. In Toronto, however, this was far from the truth.While Suits was becoming increasingly popular (during the second series it became the most-watched show in the US among viewers in the 18-49 age bracket) and her character, the smart, sassy Rachel Zane, was beginning to attract hordes of male admirers, Vitiello was the real celebrity in his home city.

Something of a Jamie Oliver figure in Toronto, albeit less laddish, he made frequent TV appearances, and he had turned The Harbord Room (which he has since closed to concentrate on his new venture, a rotisserie chain) into the city’s coolest eaterie.

Moreover, he had reportedly dated two of Canada’s most high-profile women: heiress, politician and businesswoman Belinda Stronach, 13 years his senior; and beautiful TV presenter Tanya Kim.Korean-Canadian Miss Kim co-hosted an influential talk show with Ben Mulroney, son of former prime minister Brian Mulroney and husband of style guru Jessica Mulroney. 

Jessica would later become one of Meghan’s closest confidantes, and is said to be the royal wedding planner-in-chief.She has also been tipped to be Meghan’s maid of honour. Vitiello is also friendly with Markus Anderson, global membership director of the elite private club Soho House, which has a branch in Toronto. 

Though Meghan was reportedly introduced to Prince Harry by Violet von Westenholz (daughter of Prince Charles’s pal Baron Piers von Westenholz), who did PR for Ralph Lauren when Meghan was the fashion company’s brand ambassador, Anderson is also said to have played a part in making the match.

The personable chef mingled easily with these major social players at his restaurant, and rubbed shoulders with them at charitable galas and other events.So when Meghan became his girlfriend, he provided her with a passport into the most influential echelons of Toronto society – a clique whose connections spread far beyond Canada. 

And it was this quantum leap – from actress to glittering social butterfly, and then, by dint of her campaigning work with organisations such as the United Nations and World Vision – that brought Meghan into the orbit of royalty.

Columnist Shinan Govani, Toronto’s most in-the-know social observer, met Meghan ‘many times’ and recalls throwing a dinner party she attended with her new beau.

‘She was just a cable actress to me and didn’t mean much,’ he told me. ‘Cory is a friend of mine – a lot of people know him. He is a swell guy, and pretty much liked by everyone. He would be invited [to top gatherings] by dint of his talent and personality. Within the confines of the city, being with him was definitely a useful platform for her.

He would be bigger in terms of the Establishment of Toronto. He would be leverage for Meghan.

‘A lot of TV shows have been shot in Toronto, but you don’t often see someone like Meghan up on the billboards.She was different in that respect [and] I feel like if she had never come to Toronto she wouldn’t be marrying Prince Harry. There was something about coming to Toronto, becoming friends with the Mulroneys, and having a high social cachet. It was the perfect storm that created the opportunity.’

Did Govani think Meghan deliberately engineered her social elevation? ‘All of life is deliberate.I think she took advantage of the opportunity that came her way. It was a case of serendipity; opportunity meets luck. There was something inside of her that wasn’t content with just being an actress. I mean, what would have happened after Suits? She wasn’t getting any younger.’

Yet all this is hindsight.Back in the summer of 2014, before the doors slid shut on her relationship with Cory, Meghan was blissfully happy with her lot. Indeed, life ‘had never felt so good’. She declared as much in her quirky blog, The Tig, which she had launched that year with the aim of further raising her profile.