A culinary chapter closed in Ballarat on December 21, with kitchen and cookware retailer Le Kitchen shutting its doors.
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Susen Ritchie, who has worked in the shop for 26 of its 27 years and owned it for the last 13-and-a-half, says the time has come for her to focus on other things.
The store was renowned for supplying the best kitchenware and other food goods to the city's chefs and cooks, both professional and amateur, and for providing advice and classes on cooking.
Now the shelves are almost empty. Ms Ritchie says she has few regrets and many good memories about the business.
"My philosophy in Le Kitchen was: everything I stocked in here, I used," she says.
"I tried it; if I didn't like it, I didn't stock it. I didn't just go and buy whatever and shove it into the shop. It was literally things I liked and believed in, either value for money or the best quality."
Susen Ritchie says shoppers would come in asking for a certain brand, and her experience in knowing what was the best quality and value enabled her to steer them towards better choices.
"I kept all the good stuff, the best you could use for different and specific cooking requirements," Ms Ritchie says.
"If somebody came in and asked if I had something and I didn't, it was because it wasn't good enough.
"When I started at Le Kitchen we could get a lot more of the European products. But now there's a lot of importers who are afraid to invest in importing those goods. So there aren't a lot on the market.
"For example, Wusthof. Beautiful knives, but the importer was only importing a small range of those knives, instead of the broad range, and we were getting less and less specialty than we were many years ago.
"The range was decreased so they could get value for money for the wholesalers and sell it straight away, instead of having these unique pieces that they wouldn't sell quickly. So the range is shortening. It used to be so much better."
Ms Ritchie says retail in Ballarat has changed dramatically, both with online competition and rental pressure.
"Internet shopping started at least 15 years ago, but the suppliers started to support internet shopping about 10 years ago, and in the last five years (for sales) it's been a rapid drop-off," she says.
"It's not the reason I've finished - but it was either do something on the internet or don't, and I'm not interested in it. I don't internet shop; I find it very boring. You can't touch, see, feel, look at products. You can't get information from it."
After 26 years at Le Kitchen, Ms Ritchie says her experience of what people get into, food and otherwise, has broadened.
"We've done it and seen it all, let me put it that way. People have huge kitchen fetishes. Over the years with all the cake decorating and cooking classes that we've had, we have had fabulous times.
"And when you're standing around doing cake decorating classes, some of the girls come out with life stories... you think, 'Oooh we shouldn't be talking about this in cake decorating in front of everyone else?' Because the courses run for weeks, they get quite intimate. They tell me everything, and I have been taught some things..."
The store had to end at some stage, Ms Ritchie says.
"I'm going to have a break from everything and concentrate on my kids. I've learned so much, I've got customers who I've loved, I have loved the girls - and boys - who've worked for me. But... yeah. I've had enough of retail."
Ms Ritchie says anything left after Saturday December 21 will be donated to her four favoured charities: the 4EK Foundation, Nazareth House, the 3BA Christmas Appeal and the CFA.
