You
see, IKEA is not just a place where you can find a packed parking lot and
fiberboard furniture with odd capitalized names (AKURUM, KVIBY) you must
assemble yourself. No, IKEA also has a restaurant, bistro, and a
food market. The market and the café are on the ground floor. The market has Swedish
cookies and candy and fish paste in a tube. The café has
fifty-cent hot dogs and $1 cinnamon rolls, seventy-five-cent coffee
and $1 frozen yogurt.
Upstairs
is the restaurant, which is really more of a cafeteria. If you’re coming just
to eat, do yourself and look for the “You Are Here” signs. Without the
shortcuts on those signs, you’ll pass through every other room before
getting to the food. Once you do, get in line and grab a tray.
The
best-known IKEA meal is the 15 Swedish meatballs for
$4.99. Considering you can also buy these meatballs frozen in bags, they’re
reasonable close to homemade. Not spongy or overly salted, you can taste a hint
of nutmeg through the cream sauce. Fifteen meatballs is a lot of food and
that’s before you include the roughly-mashed potatoes and lingonberry
sauce. Lingonberries are related to cranberries. Some call them cowberries,
but who would want to eat that?
Chicken Marsala
is also $4.99, but not as impressive. The chicken was thin and a touch dry,
while the sauce tasted more of mushrooms than wine. Served with rice and
vegetables, the sugar peas were crisp but the broccoli had gone limp and soggy.
A row of refrigerated shelves holds sandwiches,
salads and desserts. Gravad lax ($4.99) is cured, but not smoked, raw
salmon. Curing concentrates the fish’s flavor, but leaves it tasting “fresh.”
The two thin slices covered half my plate. The other was filled with mixed
greens. The sauce on the side had some fancy name, but it’s essentially
honey-mustard dressing. I preferred it on my greens rather than the salmon.
If you’re tight on cash, the shrimp sandwich
is $2.99. Served open face and cold, it’s slices of hard-boiled egg, quality
mayo and a handful of tiny steamed shrimp. While waiting in line, I watched an
IKEA employee fuss over the sprig of herb on each sandwich until he got it just
right.
For dessert, I’d suggest the Swedish apple
cake ($2.29) over the almond cake ($1.29). The almond cake was
flavorless, but did come with a little chocolate candy similar to a
Heath bar. The apple cake is more like a deep slice of cinnamoned apple pie. It
was also just a tiny bit frozen in the middle.
A tiny fountain soda is overpriced at
$1.29, but you can go back for refills. In addition to the regular brands,
there’s IKEA’s in-house brand of lingonberry (yes, again) soda. Bottles of Kristian
Regale fruit Sparklers are $2.29.
Dish: Even in the mad crush of shoppers and gawkers, IKEA staff is
unfailingly polite. It’s almost as if they haven’t had time to be sick of their
jobs yet. One unusual thing – IKEA wants you to bus your own table and has a
special cabinet of slots for your dirty trays.
Damage: If you don’t count sales tax, there are plenty of meal
options for under $5. Plus, because no employee ever comes to your table,
there’s no one to tip.
Decision: Right now, the IKEA crowds are so thick that you want to swing on that slow guy with a PJAS and shove him through a LIATORP. (OK, maybe just me.) After the New Year and the crowd drops from “insane” to “busy,” I’m going back for some of that herring in a tube.
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