Friday's loosening of the state's COVID-19 lockdown rules won't mean a return to normal for Tamworth's food scene, with one local cafe owner claiming a new 10-person cap on customers is "unfair".
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From Friday, restaurants and cafes will be permitted to open their doors to sitting customers - but will be limited to just 10, no matter their floorspace.
That will mean an end to the ban on customers sitting to have a meal. Since March, dining in has been banned, with cafes and restaurants only open for delivery or take-away.
Kristy Sollars can ordinarily fit about 130 people in her Peel Street business, the Inland Cafe. Bringing in just ten means her larger coffee shop will be relatively disadvantaged compared with smaller hole-in-the-wall cafes, she said.
"I know they have to start somewhere and I appreciate that," she said. "But I think the numbers are just too small."
She plans to set out table and chairs on Friday as restrictions are loosened, but said it probably won't mean business as usual.
Ms Sollars has had to dig into her mortgage and superannuation to cover the bills and probably will still have to keep doing that.
"It's getting better and better for me everyday, I'm taking more and more money every day, but it still doesn't cover two wages."
Many restaurant owners see the hard limit as an inflexible solution, saying larger business could have maintained 1.5 metre social distancing and a limit of one per person per four square metres while bringing more customers back.
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Corey Morris's family owns Cafe Gusto and said it's not a fair approach to set the same cap for everyone.
The cafe is on the right side of the new rule. It probably couldn't fit 10 people indoors while maintaining social distancing rules anyway, he said. But he feels for the bigger places. "It's definitely not fair, I reckon they should be able to do more," he said. "If you've got the room you should be able to do it."
He said the Tamworth cafe has been able to do deliveries and sell morning coffee to their regulars, but even the smaller restaurant is suffering. Mr Morris estimates turnover is down four-fifths on normal times.
They can't keep going forever, he said.
"Depends of how much of my house deposit I want to chew," he said.
"For both of us, we've piled heaps of money into it. I haven't drawn a wage since this started; we've all been living off savings. "We're pretty lucky because we're a family business."
Pig and Tinder Box owner Fraser Houghton said they haven't decided yet whether to open the doors of the Peel Street restaurant, or neighboring cafe, Sonny's Bakery, for sitting customers. He said it was a step in the right direction, but little more than that.
"These things work at scale. There's no way for ten people that you can resume operations how they were," he said.
"It's going to be a bit of a balancing act, between now and getting back to normal operations."
Tamworth Business Chamber President Jye Segboer urged businesses to get in touch about how to safely open their doors as restrictions lift. He encouraged businesses to wait for stage two, which will allow 20 customers to dine in, before reopening if that made more financial sense.