Moose Jaw’s Deja Vu Cafe to reopen June 1 after closing due to chicken shortage – Regina | The Canadian News

Déjà Vu Cafe, a staple of the Moose Jaw, Sask. dining scene and well known outside the Friendly City, has been closed since May 16 after running out of chicken.

The restaurant, which has been featured on Food Network due to its popularity, covered its front windows and posted a sign explaining the situation during the temporary closure.

“Sometimes you hear people through the door, like, ‘No chicken,'” said owner Brandon Richardson.

The staff at Deja Vu Cafe – known for its chicken wings and milkshakes – is as stunned as its customers by the closure due to a shortage of the item that makes up 95% of its menu. In fact, the restaurant has only three entrees that do not include chicken.

“I’ve been here for 10 1/2 years. We’ve run out for a few hours, maybe a day, but never like this,” said manager Kelly Tollefson.

Like many other businesses since the pandemic began, Deja Vu is at the mercy of the supply chain.

“Our supplier ran out of stock. We got the last of it and held onto it until there was no more. Awaiting new shipments,” Richardson said.

“It seems like today is the reason for everything. I never thought that two years after it all started would be when we’d start seeing supply shortages,” Tollefson said.

Deja Vu is known for its variety of more than 100 flavors of both milkshakes and chicken. But more importantly, according to the owners, it is renowned for its quality, so they were unwilling to try a new supplier to avoid closure in the short term.

“It’s our brand. It’s our homemade chicken strips. It’s our chicken wings. We’ve been using the same product since day one and I’m totally against substitutions or changing the product,” Richardson stressed.

Tollefson echoed the sentiment, saying, “Chicken is chicken, yes, but the quality we serve here is incredible. You can’t find it anywhere else, so we don’t go down and people get what they don’t expect from us.”

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The timing of the chicken shortage is not ideal, but it could have been worse, Richardson said.

“Fortunately it didn’t happen in June, July or August. Those are the busiest months here in Moose Jaw because of tourism and everyone coming out,” Richardson said.

“For us to have to close right before a basketball tournament, for example, was in town. It’s 66 teams. We would have guaranteed to get some of those teams in, and we couldn’t because, unfortunately, we had to close,” Tollefson recalled.

After all the closures and capacity limits that have occurred over the past two years, this is another hurdle for Déjà Vu, which was successful with takeaway orders during the peak of the pandemic.

“This has all been a new learning curve of how to operate a business, changes you have to make all the time, and sometimes difficult decisions. Mine was to temporarily shut down until our product arrives because I don’t want to jeopardize our product or our way of doing things,” Richardson said.

The restaurant owner took advantage of the time while they were closed, which customers will be able to see when they return to eat the popular chicken.

“We put in new flooring throughout the building, did some painting, did some additional repairs. More and more cleaning they do every day, but we did more and more, so we accomplished a lot,” Richardson said.

Customers will be able to check out the renovations when the store reopens on June 1^st. They are expecting a shipment of chicken early next week to prepare for an intense and exciting week.

“It’s a lot of fun. Working at this restaurant for so long, you meet a lot of new people. It’s a great atmosphere,” Tollefson says.