Restaurants: Ikea Coquitlam

Big M and I spent the morning cleaning the house and I was feeling pretty good about that. I suggested that we go to Ikea and celebrate our domesticity by eating meatballs with fries and gravy!

Post JC food rule #25, I can eat gravy as long as I am at Ikea. Hooray! Ikea on a Saturday afternoon is always a gong show. We show up at 1:30 and get a great parking spot by the exit door. Everything is going great. We head straight to the food and the line is long. No worries, it moves fast and what else do we have to do? It starts to get weird when there are napkins covering some of the items on the menu. Over the meatballs part of the menu. We watch the people who are going towards the cashier and no one has meatballs. There are no picture signs of meatballs.... We get to the trays and a cook comes out and puts a sign up that they have RUN OUT OF MEATBALLS.

What? How does Ikea run out of meatballs? Who is getting fired for that mistake? When we are paying I ask the cashier and she says "well, it is summer" while the one beside her gives me the stink eye for complaining.

As we always order meatballs and gravy when we are at Ikea, it was a no-samesies meal for Big M and me. What to do? Ikea really has ramped up the "healthy" meal items. They now offer a hummus plate that looked really good. Fresh veggies and pita with a scoop of thick looking hummus in the middle. They also have more salads and wraps on the menu.

The only thing that I could have eaten fries and gravy with was the roasted chicken. I have chicken for dinner tonight (chicken puttanesca from In The Kitchen With Anna: New Ways With The Classics) so I sadly abandon the gravy and try a new menu item: vegetarian crepes with spinach and cheese. It come with a side salad.



Really good! I was surprised about crepes from an industrial kitchen. They don't seem like an easy thing to mass produce. Did they make them by hand or do they have a crepes making machine back there now? They had just put out a new batch when I hit the counter so they were really fresh.



Lucky for me, Big M ordered the chicken with fries and gravy so I was able to sneak a couple of fries off his plate.



He has had chicken from Ikea before where it was very dry, so he was quite pleased with how moist it was today.

Our favorite part of the Ikea cafeteria, it is licenced!



You can only have 2 beers or wine, and you must eat when you drink. Drinking and shopping- best idea ever.

I didn't get meatballs, but 2 good meals, a lingonberry drink and a beer for $17.00 is a great deal.