Antonio Cavaliere was just 15 when he left Lazio, Italy, to join his brother in Dublin to train as a chef for two years.

“We met just before his two years were up ... and he’s still trying to get back,” laughs his wife Marion over lunch at Ristorante Rinuccini. The restaurant recently celebrated 25 years in business in Kilkenny with the award for best customer service in Ireland to add to its many accolades, including recommendations in the Michelin, McKenna and Georgina Campbell guides. When it comes to Italian food, this writer has been the victim of many the gloppy carbonara or stodgy pizza in the past.

Lunch at Rinuccini’s, however, restores this cuisine to its rightful place, starting with seared Kilmore Quay scallops with extra virgin olive oil, white wine and garlic, topped with crispy pancetta, followed by fresh ravioli stuffed with ricotta and spinach in a tomato sauce. For the grand finale, salted chocolate tart with homemade honey and biscuit ice-cream (which we manage to polish off, despite our earlier protestations that we could not possibly manage another bite).

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With Antonio in the kitchen, letting his food do the talking, Marion fills Irish Country Living in on a story that has all the essential ingredients of the best yarns.

Raised in Drimnagh in Dublin, where her parents ran a supermarket, she was just 17 when she met Antonio while having dinner with her family at Quo Vadis, one of the first Italian restaurants in the capital.

“He was just gorgeous,” she smiles. “And he had a very flashy sports car.”

Two years later, they were married; though Marion admits her family initially thought that she was too young to wed.

“So I turned around and said: ‘We either get married with your blessing or we do it Italian style and just elope,’” she recalls.

And it was that same determination that led Marion and Antonio to relocate to Portlaoise just six months later to open their first restaurant.

“It was very naive,” she admits, and for the first two years they lost money while surviving on an overdraft.

“I was 19 and he was 21,” says Marion. “We knew we were young, but we didn’t realise quite how young to be taking on the responsibilities that we did without any buffer behind us.”

However, as luck would have it, The Irish Times food writer Theodora Fitzgibbon happened to pass through Portlaoise one rainy Sunday night on her way home from a funeral and stopped for dinner.

“I was at home that evening and Antonio rang me and said: ‘There’s a lady here and she’s looking for a copy of the menu,’” recalls Marion. “Now, we had about 12 menus and they were very precious.

“I said: ‘Who does she say she is?’ and he said: ‘It’s a very funny name, I’ll spell it for you.’ So as soon as he spelled Theodora, I said: ‘Give her anything.’”

A few weeks later, a rave review appeared in the paper.

“We literally had a queue outside the door from then on,” says Marion. “It just transformed the business.”

The new customers included a huge number of people travelling from Kilkenny and, realising the opportunity in the city in 1989, Antonio and Marion opened Ristorante Rinuccini in a former basement on The Parade opposite Kilkenny Castle.

“We started off with 40 chairs,” recalls Marion of their modest beginning. “We now have 110.”

Italian style with an Irish twist

While Antonio’s style of cooking is true to the ristorante tradition, all dishes have an Irish twist, with twice-weekly trips to Kilmore Quay, free-range eggs, turnover bread and salad leaves from Callan, beef from Dawn Meats in Carroll’s Cross, rose veal from Windgap, flours and grains from Bennettsbridge and so on. The Cavalieres also work with producers in Italy to import olive oil, parmesan and their wines, cutting out the middlemen to offer customers better value.

The recession did pose challenges, but Marion explains that by watching costs closely, they survived without letting staff go or cutting wages.

“The coffee machine, instead of being switched on at 10am for all the staff, didn’t get switched on till 12pm,” she gives as just one example.

“We just reviewed everything.”

Marion and Antonio have now been joined in the business by their son Riccardo and his wife Orla, while son Antonio runs Cashel Fresh Foods in Co Tipperary, their daughter Massimiliana is a teacher in Italy and Daniella works with the BBC in Belfast.

The entrepreneurial streak is clearly still strong in the family; their grandson Cameron, who has his own design company, The Silver Factory, was still in secondary school when singer Rhianna wore one of his t-shirts in her We Found Love video.

But even after 25 years at Rinuccini’s, Marion and Antonio have no intention of taking a back seat anytime soon for la dolce vita.

“Every time we come back from Italy, we say we’re going to cut back from a six-day week to a five-day week or even a four-day week,” says Marion.

“But it’s a conversation that never gets any further than the Aer Lingus flight.”

Ristorante Rinuccini, The Parade, Kilkenny Tel: 056-776-1575 | www.rinuccini.com