The Shoalhaven recently lost a leader of the local restaurant scene with the death of Paola Ilardi, who spent years feeding and nourishing people throughout the Shoalhaven.
As co-owner with husband Joe of the award-winning Trevi Fountain Restaurant and Tuscany Wood Fire Restaurant, Mrs Ilardi was part of a dynamic team.
Joe was always the front man, managing things out the front and welcoming guests with a deep-seated warmth, while his wife took charge in the kitchen, creating authentic Italian food with recipes and techniques passed on from one generation to the next.
In fact the Trevi was even named the state's best Italian restaurant at one stage.
But Mrs Ilardi had a late introduction to commercial cooking.
When the family moved to the Shoalhaven in the late 1970s she was a hairdresser, before getting her first taste of the hospitality sector as an original manager of the South Nowra McDonalds.
That experience helped take Mrs Ilardi's love for cooking to a much larger scale, leading to the couple opening the Trev Fountain in Nowra's Kinghorne Street in 1992.
And the restaurant was focused on being a place where families could get together to enjoy hearty, wholesome food in a welcoming setting.
In the process the restaurant supported a wide variety of community groups and organisations, even donating pastas and sauces to a soup kitchen.
While she was a genuinely kind and gentle boss in the kitchen, Mrs Ilardi never hesitated to take on the hardest, and often dirtiest tasks that are part of commercial hospitality.
While she was a genuinely kind and gentle boss in the kitchen, Mrs Ilardi never hesitated to take on the hardest, and often dirtiest tasks that are part of commercial hospitality.
Joe and Paola ran the Trevi for 13 years before taking a few years off, then going back to open the Tuscany Wood Fire Restaurant in 2010.
It closed in the middle of 2022 when Mrs Ilardi became too sick to work, due to the cancer that ultimately ended her life at the age of 65.
She is survived by husband Joe, daughters Rebecca, Nadia and Belinda and their partners, and grandchildren Sienna, Jullian, Ella, Chelsea, Dillyn and Savannah.
