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Recently, Oahu has moved to Tier 3 and there is speculation that we may be able to achieve Tier 4 status by the end of the month. This means restaurants can now welcome guests in groups of 10 at a time and potentially groups of 25 soon.

As a consumer, this is exciting. We hope soon you won’t have to split your family across two tables or that your birthday celebration can include more of your friends. We want you to enjoy yourself at our businesses with the company you have been craving for the past year.

Pivoting to greater capacity, however, is a heavy haul. As we reopen to greater capacity, restaurant owners and managers hear reviews and customer comments that nimble services of yore are no longer present, opening plans are not fully realized or wait staff are overworked and inattentive.

Though it merely takes a mayor’s decree to move us up and down tiers, it takes time to hire staff. Before that, we need the customer volume to justify larger staff, and it may take a week or two.

While restaurants continue to serve below full capacity to ensure our customer’s safety and follow tier guidelines, our bottom lines needed to stay afloat are still circumscribed. All this is to say: we are working on maintaining your quality experience, but we still have one hand tied behind our back.

Longer wait times, longer lines or reductions in customer service like offering on-line ordering are requisites to the current environment, which include social distancing guidelines as well as skeleton staffing models.

We also continue to commit to superior products. This is something that COVID-19 hasn’t affected: your incredible palate. Working in the restaurant business for over 25 years, with half of that time at home in Hawaii, I know how much Oahu residents crave and love quality food experiences.

With Pizza Mamo, we pivoted the Brick Fire Tavern space to a grab-and-go pizza concept, focused on unique American pizza varieties made from exceptional products.

We source Central Milling California organic flour, vine-ripened California tomatoes, whole milk dairy-farm-direct mozzarella and Wisconsin brick cheese for our Brooklyn- and Detroit-style pizzas. Working with top-of-the-line organic products that no one else in the state is using increases the base, shipping and storage costs, but the sensory payoff is priceless. We are triple committing to your culinary desires.

We know that you have sacrificed so much this year. We do not want your flavor experience to be sacrificed as well.

Conversations about the cost of food at restaurants feel crippling and I ask for reprieve. On Oahu, where the median cost of homes recently exceeded $900,000, it is both a privilege and a feat to maintain a restaurant business.

Our margins are slim and have been further reduced by COVID’s impact on businesses, from increased costs of goods, insurance rates, unpredictable patronage, limited dining capacity, the cost of increased safety protocols — and the list goes on.

However, we remain committed to importing and local-sourcing high-quality ingredients and this requires investment. But we do more. We also commit to the safety and livelihood of our staff. We want them to serve you while they remain safe and distanced, as much as possible, from the threat of COVID-19 and we want them to be able to live and thrive in our community.

We want you to have access at home to incredible food and the culinary experiences that we know you travel abroad for. Next time when you feel sticker shock or put out by a longer wait for your refill, please take pause. We remained in business for you, and we have scaled back, scaled up, pivoted, sourced, revised, renamed and re-imagined dining for you. We have survived 2020 together and at this time, we need some of your graces, too.