IKEA Restaurant & Cafe (Tampines)

Its good to be an Ikea member. You not only get to accumulate points to redeem for vouchers for your furnishing needs, you get free coffee/tea too! I would suggest people staying around Tampines to start a shopping list of items from Ikea now, and one you reach $300 total, go buy those stuff and apply for the Ikea card!

This new outlet allows more people to enjoy their free flow of coffee/tea and good food at any one time. However, sad to say, they do not have wifi there. Else it'll sure attract more people to go. And if they bring down their power switch to allow public access, wow! that'll be too good to be true. (But guess this they'll probably have to start charing $3 for a cup of free flow coffee/tea. Haha!)

But still, a good place to go for lunch/dinner. Especially if you're working/staying around the area.

We all hear so much about the Swedish meatballs and, well basically Ikea Tampines' restaurant. What about it being bigger, with more tables and food and stuff. Well, I really don't know if it really is that great after all.

To begin with, I must say that they put their creativity into good use when thinking of how to make dining more convenient. As it happens for many when ordering food, usually one tray is not enough to hold all our plates and Ikea has a solution to this. If we can use trolley when shopping for groceries, why not the same for food? With it being my first time there, I was really impressed by the three-tier trolley.

To make dining more enjoyable, Ikea has kindly offered to push your trolleys back for you after you've ordered your food. However, I feel that the place is shorthanded and there are constantly trolleys around that gets in the way.

So, after getting a table, I went to order my food. Despite the horribly long queue, I was surprised to be out of it real soon. The concept of taking your own food and having to make minimum orders was quite a smart idea as the queue moves faster this way.

I ordered their Spaghetti with meatballs ($7 ) and a poached salmon ($6.50). Price sounds fine, but I must say the servings are really small and the quality of the food is not that great after all. The meatballs are actually.. no big deal. It does not go well with the spaghetti, and it does not have any unique taste (or so I was expecting). Kinda overrated I'd say. The side dish for the salmon was bad, literally. The broccoli looked like some withering old plant (you won't want to see it, what more eat it); the potato was really hard.

Having to wait 20min for a table just for this (apart from the free flow of drinks that could be a plus point).. nah, not worth it..