My nightly meal is brought to you courtesy of IKEA, food served on simple, gleaming white ARV plates, cut and delivered using SVIT utensils, with lemonade sipped from chunky POKAL tumblers. If we're feeling saucy, or it's a weekend night, there may be Cotes Du Rhone or Spanish grenache in OPTIMAL stems, or shaken Bombay Sapphire poured into a curvaceous SKIR.
My young son prefers the brightly colored KALAS ensemble, demanding a different hue for each utensil — although the plate and glass can match, if necessary.
But the food? Never Swedish.
We eat the Swedish meatballs doused in creamy gravy when we visit the store, sure, but I'd never made the leap to actually shopping for food at IKEA, as if it was an ethnic grocery store instead of a temple to inexpensive, northern European apartment design. Until this week.
