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It has been really tough, with the Covid-19 pandemic. Good, artisanal pizza, I have found, tends not to travel too well with delivery. How did you guys pull through these tough times, what has it been like?
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Kamiyama: Yeah, but pizza even more. Because it’s family-friendly! You order one pie, you can feed your whole family. And we honestly were so happy; we saw higher food sales volumes for pizza during this period, because our regular customers really wanted to have our pizzas. We were getting repeat orders twice, three times a week from regulars; and we made island-wide deliveries possible. We also wanted to include the wine sales, because that was very difficult, so I created these wine bundle specials, and made it super affordable. I knew how much the wine suppliers were selling the wines for, and so I tried to compete with those prices. So we dropped our wine prices, I curated a bundle that will please people’s palates. They just had to answer some questions for me. Do you like more fruit? Do you like the tannins? What is it that you like? And so I created a package just for them at a super affordable price, I think it was $225 for four bottles, which is really good; better than retail prices, really wellmade wines. We even included playlists for music we play at our restaurants — sort of bring the experience of Cicheti at home.
Kamiyama: It was just making sure our food delivered well. During downtime, I would order the pizza from my home, taste it and see what happened to it after a half an hour, maybe one hour waiting period, if it needed reheating or not. If it did, we included instructions.
From there we tweaked the dishes, and if it just wasn’t good enough, we did not include it in the delivery menu. Tell me about the creative process between the two of you. Kamiyama: I definitely curate my wine list according to what the chef is cooking. I think that’s most important.
The flavours of wine are so vast; I don’t expect Chef to come up with something to match my wine. But because I have so much experience, I know what goes well with umami flavours, for example, and so the wine is based on his menu.
Lim: We also do trial runs of how each dish works with which wines.
Kamiyama: Yeah, we try to work with seasonal flavours as well, I taste the food and the flavours, then I select the wines. I think what really works [for the both of us] is that we both understand that this industry takes a lot of sacrifice and a lot of commitment. We know this very well. We’ve both experienced this. We don’t, you know, don’t get lazy. We don’t fall back. We continue. It’s tough, but we still do it. We push and we push because it’s important.
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Lim: Communication is also very important. We have rant sessions! How do you see the industry recovering from this? Kamiyama: We’ve been very fortunate, because of the number of our loyal customers that we have. Ever since Phase Two started, we’ve been fully booked every day. And that’s really helped us. We decided to open on Sundays as well, because there was so much demand. So that really is making up for the losses from Covid-19. It’s been busy. Our biggest concern was our customers not wanting to come out because they were afraid, which is one of the reasons why we have a plastic barrier shield (between tables), to make people feel a lot safer. We follow all the protocols: sanitising, checking in, groups of no more than five. Any good that came out of these tough times? Kamiyama: Well, it sure seems we are really popular! (laughs) I mean, there are many options out there in Singapore, right? We are delighted that people are choosing us. A lot of anniversaries, a lot of birthday celebrations have come to our Cicheti outlets. We are very happy, to be honest.
