From humble beginnings, Marcello Nadile, and wife Vera, have built up a successful business roasting coffee and selling La Pavoni coffee machines. Approaching 40 years in business, the seeds of the Nadiles’ success were planted long before 1986.
“One person’s life is not made up of just one thing; it’s what you pick up along the way, what you’ve been taught from your parents. Our parents came from humble beginnings, from Italy, Calabria, in the south, up in the hills. It was almost subsistence living, you could say.”
“It all started when dad was in the Second World War, under the Mussolini regime, caught up in Libya, North Africa, and became a [Allied] prisoner in 1943. He was lucky enough to be brought here to Australia and spent most of those two years on a farm up in Bellingen; he was 23 years old.”
“After the war, he asked the farmer, Mr Cooper, if he were to come back to Australia would he sponsor him. He went back home, got married, 1947, but there was no work in Europe so he decided to borrow money off the family and return to Australia [Marcello still has the timber bag which carried all his parents’ possessions). Dad began in Bellingen and worked his way down to Sydney, and that is where we are today. When we came out to Australia, mum, myself and my sister, in 1956, dad had already bought a house and was paying it off.”
“I was four-and-a-half-years old when we came to Australia; my dad left in October 1950 and I was born in May 1951. Mum would send photos to dad to let him know he had a son, and would tell us that one day we would go to this faraway place. My teenage years were mixed up; I think every teenager has that bit of being mixed up: where are you going to go? What are you going to do? That was in the late 1960s, the era of the sharpies and the bodgies and the long hair. I was never a great scholar. My ambitions were always to be an architect; I helped dad with an extension to the house when another sibling came along. Everything was DIY in those days.”
“We also experienced the backyard: the beans, the fruit trees, gardening, animals – chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits. We grew up with that knowledge, and making wine, making salami, making tomato sauce. That was our teenage years. And we would go to school and try because dad said “in-house you talk Italian, out-of-house you can talk English” to keep the culture.”
“1986 was an era when things were already changing. The coffee industry wasn’t an exciting area to be in; there were restaurants, I suppose, but not as many cafes as there are today. The person we bought the business from had been there for 15 years. We just followed suit with what was happening at the time, and living, working and hoping whatever the occasion was would give us an income, give us customers. We’ve been in Annadale since 1986.”
“Any business really comes back to its beginnings; your family environment, what happens in a family, how creative your family is – not just making children but the bare essentials – and having an understanding of what you do, and the commitment you have to your family. It has to resonate but it also must come naturally to you. What resonates for us is the family unit and extending that feeling to our customers.”
Marcello Nadile
Euroespresso
165 Parramatta Rd, Annandale NSW 2038
(02) 9560 7000
www.euroespresso.com.au
Monday to Friday from 9.30am to 4pm
Saturday from 9am to 1pm
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