At Mosman’s Ormeggio at The Spit, a restaurant that hovers over our big blue harbour, diners feast on bowls of pasta twirled with seafood, and gelato zingy with lemon. Across the bridge at A’Mare, they watch as servers theatrically pound basil leaves and olive oil into pesto in a 30-kilogram Carrara marble mortar. The husband-wife duo behind these and several other venues, Alessandro and Anna Pavoni, excel at creating Italian restaurants Sydneysiders will happily travel outside their neighbourhoods for.

“Alessandro is a visionary,” Anna tells Broadsheet. She’s the organisational backbone that helps bring chef Alessandro’s concepts to life. “He sees what’s there. He can visualise it. I’m not a creative or visual person at all.”

Since launching Ormeggio in 2009, the Pavonis have become near-synonymous with restaurants that lean on the hallmarks of Italian dining – seasonal, produce-led cooking, jovial service – while infusing its traditions with Alessandro’s contemporary spirit.

For a long time, the pair have been strengthening their approach, gradually opening sharply executed restaurants that vary greatly in their briefs. The constant? They maintain the attention of Sydney’s fickle diners years after launch.

This past year, the slow burn picked up pace as the Pavonis launched two new big-ticket venues. First, there was Postino Osteria. The Pavonis – together with long-time business partner and friend Bill Drakopoulos and their team – transformed Summer Hill’s heritage former post office, which housed Sydney institution One Penny Red for 10 years, into a transportive venue evoking neighbourhood Italo. January saw the arrival of Cibaria, a multi-pronged Manly restaurant encompassing a trattoria, gelateria, bisteccheria, pasticceria, friggitoria and spaghetteria – everything you’d find in an Italian piazza – in one splashy, expansive space.

“Our vision for the future is pretty set,” Alessandro says. The chef was born and raised in Italy’s north and permanently moved to Australia in 2003. “We have goals which we didn’t achieve yet – to get bigger and stronger, with quality. Now, we didn’t plan either [of the new restaurants]. But the opportunities, when they come, if they’re right, we take them.

“Sometimes I believe when you have a vision set in the future, everything falls [into place] as you go. We feel like we are on a train going full speed. We must not be making any mistakes.”

While Alessandro looks to future goals, his cooking skews increasingly more traditional. He initially built a reputation for Italian dishes with contemporary flair. “I feel like I was the first one to do that … in Australia,” he says. But lately? “Fusion can be confusion. Now I really enjoy doing more traditional food, a little twist here and there to lighten it up [because] usually traditional Italian food is very heavy.”

It’s a confidence developed over 37 years of cooking and, he says, a result of “making peace” with his ego. That confidence has served him well. He isn’t at all threatened by a customer base of diners he’s observed is becoming only more sophisticated since his arrival Down Under almost 25 years ago.

“It’s like, are you scared of people having more knowledge? No, there’s so much self-confidence in [knowing] what you’re doing is true,” says Anna. “It’s quality. It’s well cooked. The technique is right. The flavour profile is right.”

Last year, alongside launching two new restaurants in the space of months, how the Pavonis operate also underwent a dramatic shift. They brought all their restaurants under one umbrella: Maestro Hospitality. The group’s inception is part branding exercise, part way to foster loyalty and a sense of opportunity in their staff, many of whom work across several venues.

“I don’t even know if I’d call Maestro a group,” Alessandro says. “It’s more like a team. The group thing is … to make all the people that work with us understand that they can get somewhere inside the group of restaurants.”

The Pavonis are keen to acknowledge the role their team plays in keeping established venues on track and developing newer ones. Many of their staff members, including executive chefs Victor Moya and Gianmarco Pardini, have been with the business for more than a decade.

Anna is particularly passionate about recruiting – and retaining – women in hospitality roles, encouraging them to see a career in the industry as a valid and worthy prospect, whether it be operations, management or food journalism. “You watch the hospitality industry and the women get to 30 or 40 and they bail out – they leave because they don’t understand what they can do. We don’t want to lose them. But you’ve got to show them the rest of the industry.”

The couple agree that the key to their working relationship is passion, complementary skill sets and the fact they’ve turned their hobbies into a successful business. But when Broadsheet asks what they have planned for the future, they have wildly varying approaches.

“It’s just kind of going to happen,” says Anna.

“I do have a final vision,” says Alessandro with a smile. “I see myself having a lot of great restaurants all around the world and living half of my life on Lake Garda, Italy, the other half here [in Australia] in a beautiful house, still with the challenge of the business.

“But the important thing is not the final vision, it’s the journey to reach that. Because, eventually, if you reach the vision, you must have another one after that. We live the journey, we don’t live the end goal. The end goal is nothing because when you reach it, you want more.”