Kathy Reymond is describing how she and her husband, Jacques, the renowned Melbourne chef, once worked in a Brazilian brothel. They were 22 and had been promised jobs at “the best and most famous French restaurant in São Paulo” – Jacques as head chef, Kathy running the front of house.

“This is why we were excited,” Jacques explains. “We were happy because we had already a job.”

“And accommodation,” adds Kathy.

“And we settled down nicely.”

“It was a house of leisure in the afternoons,” Kathy laughs. “It was the restaurant we were promised, but they had a few rooms.”

“It was not in São Paulo; it was in the suburbs,” Jacques jumps in. “Quite a long way. It was a brothel!”

Kathy: “Well, it wasn’t a brothel as such, no. Men would go there with their lady friends and have lunch and drink Dom Pérignon and spend a lot of money and disappear into a room for a couple of hours.”

The Brazilian bordello incident is a highlight of an hour-long chat recapping the 44-year marriage and professional partnership of one of Melbourne’s bestknown restaurant couples. Seated upstairs at the family’s L’Hôtel Gitan in inner-city Melbourne, the lively conversation hums along from their first meeting in England – at the Burford Bridge Hotel in Surrey, where Kathy Meadows worked reception and Jacques Reymond was a promising French apprentice – to France, Brazil, Spain, France again, and finally to their adopted home in Australia.

It’s been quite the adventure. Kathy insisted they leave the brothel, but they stayed in Brazil, eventually opening a 365-room hotel in the Amazon rainforest at Manaus. Kathy  was head of reservations; 23-year-old Jacques was made executive chef with a brigade of 15. They loved it there and only left after two years because Kathy became pregnant with their first-born, Nathalie. She faced a stark choice – give birth in Manaus where she’d have to bring her own mattress to the hospital or go ‘home’ to Jacques’ family village of Cuiseaux in the Jura, between Burgundy and the Swiss border.

So Nathalie was born in France. Kathy and Jacques arrived in Melbourne in 1983, opening their first restaurant a few years later and the now-legendary Williams Road mansion bearing Jacques’ name in 1992.

Jacques ran the kitchen, Kathy the floor. Both worked tirelessly for success in their adopted country. In between shifts, they raised four children.

“In the early days I would pick [the children] up from school at 3.30, take them home, feed them, bathe them, homework and everything else, and either my father or a babysitter would babysit them and I would come back to the restaurant until midnight,”

Kathy recalls. “And I thought this is ridiculous, I can’t keep doing this.”

Eventually she “stepped right back” to working only weekends and daytimes. But while she has always been instrumental in the success of the family businesses, Kathy has never sought the limelight.

“I’ve always been that way,” she explains. “It was Jacques in the restaurant and I was quite happy doing my side of it – running the front of house, the events and administration.”

After 22 years of hats and accolades, they sold their landmark restaurant in 2014. Jacques has largely hung up his apron now, but comes into L’Hôtel perhaps a few times a week “to help with mise en place or do the special  functions”. Three of their children – Nathalie, Edouard and Antoine – are in charge here and at the popular Bistro Gitan on the other side of Fawkner Park in South Yarra.

While Kathy has always been the silent partner – “there’s enough stars in the family without me being one” – Jacques’ and her children’s careers would have been impossible without her. She is, as daughter Joanna Reymond-Burns says, “pretty phenomenal at managing everything.

My sister and I say, now that we’re mothers and business owners, that we really have no idea how she did it.”

“She’s the biggest support,” Jacques agrees. “She is really the one who should be given a medal for all the effort and dedication, the respect and the support that she’s given.”

I suggest she’s his right-hand woman, indispensable. “Well, I would be, because he doesn’t know how to use a computer,”

Kathy laughs. “He has no idea.” Antoine joins us from the restaurant floor. I ask him to describe his mum’s role in the family – peacemaker, diplomat, disciplinarian?

“All of the above,” he says. Joanna gives exactly the same answer.

“Mum is a true matriarch and definitely the peacemaker,” she says.

“She just levels everyone out, really. And she’s the most patient, which  is necessary with our family and her husband.”

Mother’s Day for the Reymonds was always a sacred day when they’d shut the restaurant and bond over raclette fondue.

“I felt that I missed out on so much,” says Kathy, “that if Mother’s Day were at home, and Jacques would cook us a lovely meal, then it would be the family and it would be my special day.”

Times have changed. In recent years the Reymond restaurants have opened on Mother’s Day to meet demand. But the family will escape to the Mornington Peninsula a week earlier and spend the day together. No one apart from Kathy knows exactly what’s planned because, as usual, mum has organised everything.