The irony of publishing this on Labor Day is definitely not lost on us.

For years, we've joked that the reason we only serve pizza for three hours on Friday night is because it takes us the entire week to make it. The thing is, it really does. And lately, all of that work has been adding up.

So, after a lot of thought, we've made the difficult decision to temporarily pause our regular Friday Pizza Nights at Modern Stone Age Kitchen.

Don't panic. Pizza will be back.

But we want to explain why we're making this decision, because it says a lot about the food we make, the incredible people who make it, and what we're trying very hard to protect as Modern Stone Age continues to grow.

Three Hours of Pizza. An Entire Week of Work.

When a sourdough pizza lands on your table on Friday night, you're seeing the very end of a process that began days, and in some cases weeks, earlier. For many restaurants, preparing for pizza night means ordering the ingredients. For us, it means making the ingredients.

And we have given our team a Herculean task.

There are foundational principles at Modern Stone Age that we simply don't compromise on. Our team can't take the easy route when things get busy or reach for the conventional shortcut. They need to understand not only how to make the food, but why we're making it this way. That means understanding fermentation. It means monitoring pH, temperature and time. It means transforming raw ingredients into delicious, nourishing food using traditional processes.

It also means an enormous amount of physical labor. There is lifting, stirring, chopping, kneading, stretching, cutting, grinding, washing and scrubbing. There are repetitive motions and long hours spent on your feet.

And our team delivers. Every single week.

*This is the overwhelm Bill was already feeling back in 2021 for pizza night!*

Take the Cheese Alone...

Gallons of milk and making cheese — *Just the start of cheesemaking with Nice Farms milk*

Each week, we bring in more than 120 gallons of milk from Nice Farms to make our cheeses, much of which goes toward Pizza Night. That milk arrives in gallon containers. So before anyone has cultured anything, cut a curd or stretched a single piece of cheese, someone has to lift, open and pour more than 120 individual gallons of milk. Then there are 120 empty containers that need to be rinsed, prepared for recycling, and recycled.

And we haven't even started making cheese yet.

The milk is heated and cultured. The curd is set and cut, and then fermented for about six hours. Once it reaches the right point, the curd is heated, stretched and brined for several more hours. The finished cheese is cooled and later shredded for our pizzas.

But we're still not finished, because we don't throw away the whey.

Instead, we transform it into ricotta. We heat the whey, carefully adjust the pH and skim the beautiful, delicate curds as they raft to the surface. Those curds are drained and cooled, then eventually blended into the ricotta cream we pipe onto our pizzas.

Think about that for a moment.

All of that work for just one component of one pizza.

And Then There's Everything Else

Our Happy National Pizza Day Reel that shows the magic - and work - behind pizza night!

Someone has to chop and stack the wood that will eventually fuel the oven. Our bakery team transforms flour, water and salt into sourdough pizza dough and then carefully manages its fermentation over two days, monitoring time, temperature and pH along the way.

That last part matters more than most people realize. We're aiming for the dough to pass just below pH 4.6 shortly before we stretch and bake it. If the fermentation hasn't progressed far enough, then it hasn’t reached its maximum nutritional threshold. But fermentation can also go too far. As acidity increases and proteolytic activity continues, the gluten structure eventually weakens to the point that the dough simply won't hold together properly when stretched.

So our bakers aren't just making dough and waiting two days. They're managing a living fermentation and trying to land it in the right place at the right time.

Meanwhile, our butchery team is breaking down locally raised pigs. Some of that pork becomes Italian sausage, which then has to be cooked. Some becomes pepperoni, which has to be made, smoked, cooled and sliced.

Then there are all the other seemingly simple components. We mill the San Marzano tomatoes. We mince the garlic. We pick the basil. We caramelize the onions. We slice the roasted red peppers that have been fermenting for ten days.

Watch How Our Pizza is Made

And, because apparently we don't know how to make things easy on ourselves, there's a different pizza special every week. Each one brings another set of ingredients, processes and preparation.

Finally, Friday arrives.

We light the fire around 11:30 am, begin to move the dough out of the walk in mid afternoon and then ultimately stretch the dough and build the pizzas. And for three hours, from 4:00 until 7:00, you get to experience the culmination of an entire week's work.

But when the last pizza comes out of the oven, the work isn't finished. The fire has to be spread. The prep areas have to be broken down and cleaned. There are mountains of dishes. The floors need to be mopped. And the entire kitchen needs to be reset.

Because Saturday morning is coming.

And Saturday Morning Is Coming Fast

*The line wraps out the door and down the block*

We're heading into our busy season, and lately our weekends have looked something like this: We open at 8:00 on Saturday morning, and by 7:45 there's already a line at the door. On Sunday, we open at 9:00, and by 8:45 there's a line again. Many weekends, that line doesn't really stop until we close the doors at 2:00.

On Saturday, a customer happened to be standing at the very end of our breakfast line (ends at 11am), which at that point stretched down the sidewalk past the realtor's office. When he finally reached us, he shared something that really stuck with us.

He couldn't believe how calm everything felt.

The people waiting were calm, but more importantly, our team was calm. Even with a line stretching down the sidewalk, he noticed that people were still being treated with care, time and attention. The kitchen was moving. Everything was clean. Nobody seemed frantic.

That compliment meant an enormous amount to us, because that's exactly what we want to protect.

You Trust Us With Your Food

We know why many of you are willing to stand in that line.

You know what you're getting when you eat here. You know that the breakfast meat came from a local animal that was brought into our kitchen and transformed here into the sausage or bacon on your plate. You know where the eggs came from. You know we make the cheese. You know our breads and pastries are made with an organic, wild, long-fermented sourdough process. You know that we aren't choosing ingredients or processes simply because they're faster or cheaper.

And perhaps the comment that means the most to us is one we hear from parents again and again:

"This is the one place I let my kids order whatever they want."

Think about the amount of trust contained in that sentence.

A parent can bring their child to our pastry case and say, "Pick something," because they know the food was made with intention. Health and nutrition matter. Traditional processing matters. Ingredients matter. And flavor absolutely matters, too.

We're not interested in making "healthy food" that nobody actually wants to eat. We want the croissant your kid is begging you for to also be something you feel really good about saying yes to.

That's what you've trusted us to do.

We Need to Protect the People Who Make It Possible

And this is where we need to be transparent: the pace is taking a toll on our team.

Every member of our incredible team works really, really, really hard. We're asking them to spend an entire week producing everything required for Friday Pizza Night, work Friday night service, clean and reset the Kitchen and then turn around hours later for the two busiest days of our week.

We are not complaining. Not in the least. We love this. Every bit of it. We love transforming incredible raw ingredients into beautiful, delicious and, most importantly, nourishing food for you and your family.

But loving something doesn't mean you can't ask too much of the people doing it.

As Modern Stone Age grows, we need to make sure we're growing intentionally and consciously. Sometimes that means taking a step back so that we can take a few steps forward.

So we asked ourselves a difficult question: What can we pause without compromising who we are?

We could make Pizza Night easier. We could buy the cheese. We could buy the pepperoni. We could buy the sausage. We could use yeast instead of a sourdough fermentation. We could buy more of the components already made. There are a hundred shortcuts available to us.

But that solves the wrong problem.

We don't want to make our food less intentional so that we can make more of it. We want to create enough space for our team to continue making the food you've trusted us to make, week after week, without burning them out in the process.

So something needed to give.

For now, that something is Friday Pizza Night.

Pizza Isn't Just a Menu Item

There's another reason we're very deliberately using the word pause.

Pizza occupies a special place at Modern Stone Age because we teach through pizza. We've used it with children, college students and adults to teach fermentation, cheesemaking, butchery, traditional food processing, sourcing and what it actually looks like to make food from scratch.

Think about everything contained in a single pizza: grain and fermentation, milk and cheesemaking, meat and preservation, vegetables and fire. Someone can stretch fresh cheese, work with sourdough, build a pizza, watch it bake in a wood-fired oven and then sit down and eat what they just created.

In one experience, we can explore so much of what we mean when we talk about using traditional processes to transform raw ingredients into foods that are safer, more nourishing and more delicious.

That isn't disappearing.

Click through and see pieces of a 4-day hands-on pizza class with Gunston School - they made every ingredient!

Pizza Will Be Back

We mean that. Pizza will be back.

It may show up through classes, special events and experiences. And eventually, regular Pizza Night may look a little different, too. We're giving ourselves permission to figure that out.

Because we're learning that growth doesn't always mean adding another night, another product, another menu item or getting more people through the door. Sometimes growth means recognizing what is working extraordinarily well and creating enough space to protect it.

*We’ll be pouring the wine soon and slicing the pies again! Just give us some time - thanks!*

Really Good Food Takes Labor

Maybe Labor Day really is the perfect day to share this, because there is an enormous amount of human labor hidden inside the food we eat.

Someone chopped the wood. Someone fed the sourdough mother and mixed the dough. Someone monitored the fermentation. Someone opened more than 120 gallons of milk. Someone made the cheese and transformed the whey into ricotta. Someone butchered the pig, made the sausage and smoked the pepperoni. Someone stretched your pizza and tended the fire. Someone stood at the register and welcomed the next person in a line stretching down the sidewalk. Someone washed the dishes. Someone mopped the floor.

And somehow, in the middle of all of that, our team continued to make people feel cared for.

That's the part we refuse to lose.

We're incredibly proud of the food we make. But we're even more proud of - and grateful for - the people whose hands and hearts make it possible.

So this Labor Day, we're choosing to respect that labor by being more intentional about where we ask our team to put it.

Friday Pizza Night is taking a rest.

Our pizza isn't going away forever, and neither is our commitment to doing food differently.

Thank you for trusting us, for standing in those lines, for noticing the work and for supporting the people who do it.

And thank you for understanding when we say:

This isn't goodbye, pizza. It's see you soon.

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Really Good Food Takes Labor: Why We're Pausing Pizza Night