Moo Shu Ice Cream is moving to Stella Luna’s old digs in Hintonburg

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For Liz Mok, moving her popular Centretown business Moo Shu Ice Cream & Kitchen to a larger location has been many years coming.

“By our second year, we were outgrowing our space,” says Mok, whose store, which opened in 2015 on Bank Street near Flora Street, occupies just 700 square feet.

Mok says that she’s found bigger digs at last, at an address that some might chalk up as a case of ice-cream karma.

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Mok has begun renovations at the 2,300-square-foot space in Hintonburg that was the home of a Stella Luna Gelato Café location until it suddenly closed in late December last year, a week after it laid off nearly its entire workforce.

Moo Shu is known as one of Ottawa’s most progressive downtown businesses, taking up stances such as the championing of living wages for its workers. Stella Luna, an award-winning Ottawa-based brand launched in 2011, saw its notoriety rise and popularity wane in recent years, most notably after its founder, Tammy Giuliani, made a $250 donation in support of the convoy occupation in Ottawa in the winter of 2022.

Stella Luna also faced a public backlash following a spring 2023 contretemps in which a neighbouring food business, Sharpfle Waffle, was forced to move because Stella Luna insisted that the exclusivity clause in its lease be executed.

But Mok preferred not to talk about politics, or about Stella Luna, which has three remaining locations, in the Glebe and in Merrickville and Chelsea.

“We don’t know them,” says Mok. “We’re going to move there, we want the seating and we want to be able to have some winter sales.”

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Moo Shu is renowned among connoisseurs for the artisanal, often Asian-inspired ice cream that Mok, a native of Hong Kong, makes. And yet, Mok calls her move to Hintonburg a “big gamble” and says the outlook for her business is, in fact, worrisome.

“I’m staring down at a slow death,” she says.

Many businesses, she says, are either closing or making big changes because of prospects that appear to be diminishing.

“You’re either looking at a slow death or a quick one if you’re not taking opportunities to grow,” Mok says.

While operating Moo Shu involves carrying a high debt load, “We’re kind of just doing it. We’re making through,” she says.

Her business’s biggest challenge is “just the seasonality of ice cream,” which makes for summers that are much busier than winters and staffing levels that fluctuate accordingly.

But this model isn’t sustainable, given that increasingly unpredictable summer weather due to climate change has meant less business and fewer tourists, Mok says.

“Summers are down,” Mok says. “We’re not getting as much traffic as before. It’s too cold or too hot.”

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Gone are the long weekends when tourists from Montreal or Toronto would visit Moo Shu with coolers to stock up on their favourite flavours, she notes.

She also contends that the City of Ottawa isn’t investing in the downtown “in the way that it needs to.”

The bottom line? According to Mok, it’s that “in two or three years, I can’t say our current business model is going to do any better.”

Her solution, she hopes, is to move to a larger location with seating, which just happens to be Stella Luna’s old Hintonburg location, where she can sell coffee, ice cream and other products year-round while employing a larger team.

Moo Shu currently employs about 20 in the summer and about 13 or 14 in the winter. Mok says it’s crucial for her to retain workers because Moo Shu’s from-scratch, high-quality products — current special flavours include mandarin orange and puerh tea, as well as osmanthus blossom and peach caramel — require well-trained, skilled staff to build and maintain institutional knowledge.

“My goal has been to be a living wage-certified employer. It’s about giving stable, reliable employment, which requires us to pay salaries in the winter,” she says. “The way to overcome that is to solve the problem of bleeding money in the winter.”

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Mok says she hopes to open in Hintonburg in November. But she’s sad about leaving Centretown, since the neighbourhood contributed so much to Moo Shu’s success during its formative years.

“My brain still thinks of myself of an artist and when you start, you need people to just support you and believe in your vision and believe in your art. My ice cream is better now, having had that neighbourhood to support us.”

The decision to leave Centretown came down to money, Mok says. “When we were looking for a space, Centretown was always our first pick. But the asking rents are just too high for Centretown, so it’s just hard to stay.”

phum@postmedia.com

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