When you think of Sweden, what's the first thing you think of? IKEA, that’s what! The IKEA café is not just a perfect example of Swedish cuisine; it is also the only example of Swedish cuisine in Melbourne.
IKEAVictoria Gardens Shopping Centre
Cnr. Victoria Street and Burnley Street
Richmond VIC 3121
Restaurant Opening Hours:
Open 7 days
Sat-Wed 9:30am-5:30pm
Thur-Fri 9:30am-7:30pm
The IKEA Concept is based on offering a wide range of well designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them. The IKEA café follows this principle: IKEA cuisine is functional, in that it is edible, but it isn’t exactly haute-cuisine.
This week our swarve self-serving Swedish samplers were: Naomi, Paul, Deb, Boasty, Rami and Caroline.
The Meal:
There was a wide range of food available at the café, however they only served two stereotypical Swedish mains: Swedish Meatballs (78% beef and pork) and smoked salmon. Oh, they also sold cans of VB (?!?) - apparently, IKEA is a licensed venue. Who knew?
The food was also fairly well designed – the bizarre, flurescent green icing on the traditional Swedish Princess cake demonstrated that affordable and practical doesn’t have to be boring.
Although the actual number of Swedish dishes served is small, don’t fret. You can go and visit IKEA’s Swedish Food Market, located after the checkouts, where you can find traditional Swedish food and drink like herring, crisp bread, lingonberry fruit conserve, beer and even vodka. There is also a great selection of Swedish sweets and biscuits and, last but not least, their famous Swedish meatballs (frozen and sold in 1kg packs). For some reason they also sell $1 hot dogs and 60c soft-serve ice-cream (that taste like milk)...hmmm…
Oh, and not only is ABBA a famous Swedish band...but it is also a famous Swedish brand!
Overall:
The Swedish food served at IKEA is like their furniture – simple and bland. However we were limited by the number of Scandinavian restaurants in Melbourne.
For the record there is a Norwegian restaurant in the Dandenong Ranges (Touch of Norway, 1367 Mt. Dandenong Turist Road, Mt. Dandenong), but they only serve traditional foods for Tuesday lunches.
2 comments:
BTW, in case anyone thought I wrote the Swedish review, I did, up to the word haute cuisine. After that, as you call tell by the (mis)spelling of the word suave, Rami wrote the rest.
Oh, and I wrote the bits under the close-up pictures of Nai and me.
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