Ikea - breakfast for a buck
I didn’t go to Ikea with the sole intention of eating breakfast, but I had noticed over the last few months, while occasionally browsing the Ikea website, that they served breakfast for $1 until 11am. Even though I am generally against advertising, I guess some forms of marketing are actually effective.
One morning this week, with some errands to run, my Very Special Ladyfriend and I were being particularly slow in getting our day into gear. I remembered the $1 Ikea breakfast, re-checked their website to confirm the fact, and then used that information as incentive to get us dressed and out of the mansion well before 11am.
The Ikea restaurant is actually not a restaurant, but a cafeteria. I expected no more than that, as most department store eateries are/were cafeterias. The cafeteria setup allows the consumer to get food exactly when they want it, and it also keeps costs and prices to a minimum. This being said, the Montreal Ikea cafeteria needs some work. As we approached the food counter, the counterperson quickly assembled 2 breakfast plates, as per the website advertisement: Scrambled eggs, home fries, 2 sausages, and a croissant. It looked exactly like the photo from the website, but without the parsley.
In our rush to get out of the mansion and into our limo, I forgot my camera, so this will be the only photo you’ll see in this post. As I grabbed our plates, I thought it strange that next to the warm bins of eggs and sausages there was also a bin of bacon and possibly some other breakfast food. I quickly scanned the wall-menu and could find no mention of any breakfast items, and the counterperson had already walked away before we took our plates, so I never got the chance to ask if I could get bacon instead of sausage or what other items were available.
Our 2 breakfast plates plus a bottled of orange juice - from concentrate (ech) - totalled about $3.45. Now that’s a deal. We found an empty table and sat down to dig in. I don’t know how cafeterias make their scrambled eggs, but these seemed puffed with air, which resulted in a texture-less, tasteless dish. The sausages were highly nitrated, similar to the sausage in a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin, but tasting a little worse. The croissant was not a real croissant, but something that was clearly manufactured, flash-frozen, shipped, defrosted and then baked. It was about half the size of a real croissant, and did not break into spirally strands like a real croissant would.
I guess we got what we paid for, and at least it got us out of the mansion.