Ikea Food
I've been coming the Ikea a lot since I arrived in the Netherlands - four times in the last month to be exact. It can be a tiring experience, dealing with out of stock issues and customer service, but I have found eating in the cafeteria kind of fun.
The first time I went to Ikea I just had a bottled juice. Then I tried the famous Swedish meatballs, "regulaar" size, which comes with fries, gravy, and lingonberry sauce. They taste nice, but after about 2 meatballs I felt really gross inside. The unctuous greasiness of the meatballs combined with the gravy just felt so tiresome to eat. I usually don't like sweet things combined with salty, but the lingonberry sauce was the only thing that saved the dish from complete heaviness. The Swedish meatballs you can find in every Ikea, but I found it interesting that other menu items vary according to location. For example, you can find chicken sate on the menu here in the Netherlands, being a really popular dish nationwide (it's the middle right hand picture on the menu board below).
This time I went and was actually going to try the meatballs again but in the small size (amazing how I sometimes crave gross things after the passage of time). But then I saw on the menu board that Ikea Family cardholders got €1 off of the "brochette van luxe vissoorten met bieslooksaus," or seafood skewer with chive sauce. Ikea Family is a Europe-only thing for now (I think), and it's like a free club card that gives you discounts on certain items in the store, like my "Special Edition for Ikea Family by Electrolux" vacuum cleaner, or free tea and coffee in the restaurant. Since I'm a sucker for deals and the seafood skewer looked nice and light with a side of vegetables, I went for it.
I got a choice of fries or buttered potato wedges, and a lemon slice, along with the shrimp, salmon, and bass (?) skewer covered in creamy sauce. Little of the creamy sauce adhered to the skewer, which was quite flavorful on its own. I also got my free tea. At this Ikea, the coffee comes from one of those automatic espresso/cappuccino machines which makes some pretty good drinks, and the tea is a choice of different tea bags including green tea, which I got.
I also really wanted to try this dessert, princesses cake (princessen gebak). Anything that's round and green is something that I would want to try. Turns out that it's a thin sheath of marzipan (I think - it was really sweet), covering a dome of whipped cream, jam, and cake. Really delicious, but so sweet you must alternate bites with sips of tea.
