Made in Saskatchewan: Elle’s Cafe

Every other week on The Greg Morgan Morning Show, Greg profiles a local business with Made in Saskatchewan, as entrepreneurs go from dreams to reality. In this episode, he talks to Elle from Elle’s Cafe in Regina.

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Listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below:

GREG MORGAN: Get set to meet with Regina’s viral sensation Elle from Elle’s Cafe. She is the creator behind some hilarious videos that have taken over your feed, likely, and turned a local cafe full of ice cream into a full-blown internet sensation. In one video, I pretended to set up a competing ice cream store nearby, and she jokingly ran me over with a scooter.

(Clip from video) “Not on my watch, Greg Morgan, I’m Elle from Elle’s Cafe, and it’s a beautiful day here today in Regina, Saskatchewan. I’m getting the ice cream cone. Maybe take one of them city scooters out for a rip!”

Yeah, the queen of ice cream has gone viral, serving up her addictive videos on Insta and sharing the lighter side of Regina for the rest of the world to see. An idea she says really took off back in the spring.

ELLE GRZEDA: To be totally honest, it kind of started as a joke. We decided this year to open a little bit earlier. About a week after we opened, we got that crazy snow downpour, and we had about 10 inches. They had just put out all of the city scooters, and I thought it was hilarious that they were just sitting there in like 10 inches of snow. And I said to my husband, “Hey, how funny would it be while you’re snow blowing if I went and stood in front of those city scooters with an ice cream cone and told everyone how beautiful it was in Regina, Saskatchewan?” It went really crazy for us, and we got a lot of comments of people wanting me to hop on the scooters, and so it kind of turned into our thing where we would come in on a not so beautiful day and tell everyone how beautiful it was in Regina, Saskatchewan. I think it worked really well for us just because of how chaotic our weather can be, and you know it’s almost bipolar.

That laugh is so infectious, Elle from Elle’s Cafe there. Now, because of Elle’s videos, people are coming from all over the world, from as far away is the U.S. and even Australia. To get to know Elle a little more, you should know first it’s not her given name.

GRZEDA: My birth name is Elnora, but since I was an infant, nobody ever called me Elnora. It’s always been Elle.

Oh, and there’s one other little fact you might be surprised to discover: those cartwheels she’s famous for in her videos are courtesy of a certain skill she’s acquired, Taekwondo.

GRZEDA: Yeah, I won nationals for Taekwondo for sp arring. That’s where the cartwheels come from.

Before she was into ice cream, she was a hydro generator technician, basically working on generators to power cities. And by trade, she was a welder and an electrician. All qualifications you really don’t need to put a swirl on top of an ice cream, do you?

GRZEDA: It’s tougher than you think. I feel like a lot of people kind of see the ice cream cone, but there’s so much behind a business that you have to worry about, and all the little details is kind of what really makes it so you can swirl that cone. You know what I mean?

For the last six years, she’s been in the cathedral district, but it hasn’t always been about ice cream at that store. Originally, they served menu items like burgers and hot dogs, but it didn’t work out the way she wanted, so they started to concentrate on ice cream.

GRZEDA: That’s where things really started to move for us. My father grew up in Poland, and his grandmother was like a pastry chef, and she kind of taught me a lot of how to bake and how to make sweets, and I’ve always had like a real sweet tooth. So, I always wanted to concentrate on that. But when we were first opening, we were naive, and we thought the best thing for us would to be sell food and to concentrate on a bunch of things instead of concentrating on one thing. And I think over the years we realized that it’s just about what works and not giving up on what you want the final thing to look like. It might not always look like the blueprint, but you’ve just got to keep going and kind of push through those those difficult outcomes and learn how to adapt.

Elle Grzeda from Elle’s Cafe is interviewed by Greg Morgan. (Brett Horton/980 CJME)

As for future plans, she dreams of an Elle’s Cafe in every city in Canada, but for now the focus is awareness by expanding her cafe clothing line, and her social media will always be a mainstay as it’s definitely working.

GRZEDA: I think one of the craziest things that I noticed is the other day I was taking my dog out for a walk. I was walking by a park, and I heard these kids playing, and they were they were screaming, “I’m Elle from Elle’s Cafe!” And the other kid goes, “Oh no, you’re not saying it right. You got to scream it louder!” And I couldn’t even believe it that you know they were they were screaming my catchphrase like that. It was honestly astonishing to see it out in public. And anytime I’m out at a restaurant or I’m out in public and I see someone wearing one of our sweaters, it brings me so much joy to see people wanting to support us, wanting to like be proud to wear the Elle’s Cafe logo.

And she hand stamps all those logos on her own clothing line.

GRZEDA: That’s another thing we do is we press and stamp everything. It’s made in Saskatchewan. It’s something that if you want to do it, you have to love it. You have to love it, or else it’s it’s not worth it, in my opinion. You gotta you gotta love what you’re doing, and I absolutely love what I’m doing.

I absolutely love Elle from Elle’s Cafe. She’s just so fun and so positive to be around, and I want to thank her for being on this edition of Made in Saskatchewan. You can find Elle’s Cafe in Cathedral on 13th Avenue.