A popular restaurant in Saanich reopened Wednesday after being forced to close for one year.
Kuku’s Take Out and Delivery has been closed since December last year, after a vehicle crashed into the building and destroyed the store.
“This front end is all new…because it was all smashed,” said Anita Madahar, co-owner of Kuku’s. “And everything else, we’ve done a lot of clean up. It looks like a brand new [take-out] restaurant again.”
A red SUV heading down Burnside Road on Dec. 4, 2019, veered off the street, jumped the sidewalk, and crashed into the restaurant at 8:45 a.m.
Saanich Police said the driver had suffered from a medical incident and had minor injuries.
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Kuku’s was closed at the time of the crash and no one else was hurt.
Randy Madahar, co-owner of the restaurant, was supposed to come in earlier that day at about 8 a.m. to help prepare a big lunch order. Instead, he decided to sleep in for an extra half hour, and as he was about to leave his home, Madahar got a call about the incident.
“It happened quarter to 9, otherwise I would have been right here,” he said, pointing to the front of the restaurant where the vehicle had been.
“Once I arrived here and I saw the front of the building, I was pretty well in tears,” Madahar said, adding “It was like a… hurricane just went through the building.”
Madahar thought it would only take a short while to get back up and running, but a couple of weeks turned into a month, and then, a year.
“We had to upgrade the building,” he explained. “So it’s not just the front part [where] the accident [was]. Once that happened, we had to get the whole area updated.”
It’s an older building, with tenants living on the floor above the restaurant. It needed structural improvements and had to be brought up to code.
Their reopening was delayed even more with COVID-19 protocols in place for construction workers and inspectors.
Finally, after a one-year-and-five-day wait, Kuku’s is back — it just looks a little different.
Jasmine Bala
