Poor ‘breakwater’: there were some issues with Ikea’s sausage. But hej!, for £1…
Hej!, as they say in Sweden, the latest cut-priced customer offer at the large homeware store could keep KEN TOWL returning to Ampere Way all the way until Christmas
When a colleague who often takes her kids to eat in Croydon’s Ikea told me about it, I didn’t believe her.
“How much?” I said.
“One pound? For breakfast?”
“Yes,” she said, “One pound. For breakfast. But you have to be a member of the ‘Ikea Family’ and it’s only on Saturdays until December 20.”
Towering success: Ikea have another success on their hands
It took me just a minute to join the family and get an email with a membership card and a QR code that would register my right to a £1.95 discount on the “full Swedish” for every remaining Saturday this year. I couldn’t wait.
Two days later it was Saturday, so I took the tram up to Ampere Way, the stop that sits in the shadow of the Ikea towers and joined a small group of people that started to gather around 8.45, standing casually as if we were waiting for a bus.
By 8.59, there were at least 50 of us – almost as many as you might get in a queue on North End for a bag of Miniso freebies.
I looked around for Mayor Jason Perry, because he’s been known to have an eye for a bargain (or a freebie). But I didn’t spot him. Had he managed to sniff out a better deal than the £1 Ikea breakfast?
Then the lights suddenly went on and the doors opened, and everyone started doing the sort of fast walk that people do when they want to get somewhere quickly but they don’t want to look like they are running. While we amateurs slowly ascended via the escalator, the experienced Ikea breakfasters legged it up the stairs to the first-floor restaurant. They were going to break their fast fast.
Ikea’s Nordic efficiency is much-admired, with good reason, and so the short queues that formed were dealt with quickly. Everyone was after the £1 breakfast, so the servers just had to shovel one item from each of the steaming piles onto the plates and send us away to the tills. Within the space of about three seconds, they plonked one sausage, one rasher of bacon, one small single-egg omelette, one hash brown, half a tomato and a lake of baked beans on to my plate.
Ramekins are the answer: Partridge would be sooo pleased
At Ikea, they delegate the tea and coffee-making to the customers, and every beverage costs £1.50. So, on arrival at the till, you are invited you to take an empty cup from a pile, asked for your QR code and proof that you are “family” so that they can apply the discount, and the bill comes to £2.50.
That generates another QR code that you can then scan to get your hot drink. There is a choice of four sauces that you can pump out of big plastic vats onto your plate: mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup and lingonberry. I don’t like ketchup, so I treated myself to a little splash each of mustard and mayonnaise. I didn’t fancy adding jam to the mix.
Before long, I was able to take one of the coveted tables by the floor-to-ceiling windows, and contemplate the items on my plate. The first mouthfuls told me one thing. This was a warm breakfast rather than a hot one. Still, it did only cost a pound.
Did it make my tastebuds sing hymns of gratitude? Not quite, but hej!, as we say in the Ikea family, at £1 for a breakfast, I’ll be happy if it fills a hole.
And it did.
I think I’ll go without the beans next time. They coated everything in a gooey orange wash of lukewarm sweetness that dominated the plate.
Unlike in the image on the Ikea screens, undoubtedly manipulated by a food-technician, in real life the beans were not confined to a ramekin.
Alan Partridge would have found this problematic.
You may remember his critique of his girlfriend’s attempt at a full English: “Bacon – 10 on 10. Button mushrooms – bingo! Black pudding – snap. Erm, minor criticism, more distance between the eggs and the beans. I may want to mix them, but I want that to be my decision. Use a sausage as a breakwater.”
Bingo!: breakfast at Ikea on Saturdays really costs £1
The Ikea sausage proved to be a wholly inadequate breakwater. And honestly, it had that homogenous texture of the economy sausage but, hej!, I can’t complain. With six items on the plate, the average cost to me for each was barely 17p.
As I scooped up the last of my cold beans and bready sausage, I surveyed the sunlit Ikea car park below. It was 9.19 on a bright autumn Saturday morning with all the promise of the weekend ahead of me.
Would I go again? I certainly will, though perhaps not every Saturday, and next time, I’ll splash out and get two breakfasts, a double Swedish, just without the tomatoey haricot flood of barely-warm beans.
With a cup of tea, that will take the final bill up to £3.50. Or I could really push the boat out and go to Ikea for breakfast on another day of the week, when the small cooked breakfast would still cost me only £2.95, plus the £1.50 mug of tea.
I might have to claim it on iC expenses…
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Do they still offer free tap water at IKEA Croydon, from the drinks dispenser? If so it you could have breakfast under the new offer for £1 or £1.50, with water but no hot drink, and make yourself a well-deserved cup of tea when you get home.
How can you even suggest having a cooked breakfast without the accompanying cuppa, David? That’s disgusting.
In Wetherspoon’s it’s usually washed down with half a gallon of wifebeater.
On Sundays IKEA don’t open until 11am but the restaurant opens at 10am. Tea & coffee is free until opening! I discovered this a few weeks ago when they held the boot fair in the car park.
What are the serving hours?
Against that, I like to have breakfast before leaving home.
Also, you lost me at ‘get a QR code to get another QR code’.
That was an amusing public service tale, to join the Whitgift Centre quest challenges.
🙂
Breakfast time.
If you’re an Ikea Family member you get tea or filter coffee free on a weekday anyway, so you’d still only pay £2.95!
The beans ‘coated everything in a gooey orange wash of lukewarm sweetness that dominated the plate’. That’s the WHOLE POINT Ken!
My then teenage son and his other delinquent mates used to bunk off from Selsdon High’s delights and head for the tram, straight down to IKEA for 1or2 £1 breakfast, years ago. It was especially helpful for them as one of said mates lived in one of the houses at the back of b&Q, so they could eat cheaply and anonymously, before slinking off to the mate’s for a busy day playing on the PlayStation.
This probably explained why he was never interested in the packed lunch provided at home …
They could have gone on until they reached school-leaving age at that rate, if my husband and I, one morning, in need of supplies, hadn’t decided to catch a quick brekkie ourselves, and caught the merry band “in flagrante”.
Busted, they were, and I promptly grassed the whole lot of them to their own parents.
I’d like to finish this tale by saying this had taught them a valuable lesson (one more than at school anyway), but all they got from that was to be a bit less obvious when trusting. And to think this lot was the “gifted and talented” group!🤦♀️