Breakfast fare is delivered with a side order of family

In the 30 years that she has devoted to the Original Pancake House, Dianne Maiola has delivered with characteristic warmth and welcome flatbeds of 49er flapjacks, dekameters of Dutch Boys and innumerable piggies in uncountable blankets.

But as co-workers and regulars attest, the family feeling that Maiola helps cultivate means as much to the restaurant’s continuing success as its famous breakfast offerings.

“When someone comes in, I just want them to come away thinking that the food was great, the service was fantastic and they felt like they were at home,” says Maiola, 67. “Our customers really are like family to us.”

Indeed, Maiola and her fellow servers know their regulars’ tendencies — “Julie: egg-white vegetable omelet” — about as well as they know those of their own kin.

Maiola’s sensibilities have been developed over more than 60 years as a full-time waitress.

She was born and raised in Honolulu. Her father died when she was 13. Her mother remarried to a career Navy man and moved the family — Maiola and and her four siblings from the first marriage plus three more half siblings — to California.

Maiola started waitressing at local restaurants at 16 and later found work at Sea World, working shifts at the Hawaiian Punch Village.

After graduating from high school, Maiola married and moved to New York, where she continued to wait tables while her husband operated an auto body shop. After eight years they moved to Hawaii.

Maiola’s husband ultimately proved an unfit partner, and Maiola divorced him shortly after the birth of their second child.

No stranger to hard work, Maiola supported her children by working a string of waitressing jobs in Waikiki and elsewhere.

In 1986 Maiola landed at the Pancake House and found in its homey, unpretentious environs a job that matched her values.

“You have to love what you do or the customer can tell,” Maiola says. “I love my job. I love my co-workers and our customers. I love it all.”

As head waitress and manager, Maiola will calmly but unequivocally correct those who work under her to make sure that their actions reflect her high standards.

“We’re like a real family,” says Didi Feleunga, who’s a mere year behind Maiola in seniority. “We enjoy each other. We also sometimes want to kill each other. But in the end we can’t live without each other.

“Dianne is like a mother figure to us,” Feleunga says. “She’ll scold us but she’ll also praise us. She’s cool.”