RESTAURANT REVIEW : Furniture Store’s Cafe Shows How Swede It Is

I never thought that I would see the day when I would be reviewing the food in a furniture store, but Ikea is not just any furniture store.

Ikea is a Swedish furniture store. More accurately, Ikea is a 250,000-square-foot chunk of Sweden itself, plunked down in the middle of Burbank, and colored bright blue and yellow like the Swedish flag. Amazingly, the food in the store’s second-floor cafeteria tastes exactly like the food in Sweden, partly because that’s where a whole lot of it comes from. Eating here is ethnic L. A.’s latest hip experience. Nobody halfway into pop culture will want to miss it.

You see the Euro symbols indicating restaurant and cafe up on the roof as you approach the building. Squint and you can even see them from the Golden State Freeway. You know the ones: square boxes with black stencils on white backgrounds--knife and fork, a coffee cup. I half-expected to see a pine tree with a little roof over it alongside, but no such luck--you can do almost anything in the store, but you cannot sleep here.

The dining area is cheerful and maddeningly functional. There’s lots of ambient overhead light bouncing off the sea-foam-colored walls, and the space is surrounded by sane, sober items like Ramlosa mineral water in crates. Tables are small but intelligently arranged, and the sleek black wooden chairs seem almost arrogantly efficient. For children, there’s a downstairs play area filled with Swedish kites. And near the tables stand large carts on which you are instructed to place your trays when you have finished eating. You didn’t think that the politically correct Swedes would let you just leave everything, did you?

Serving yourself is a snap. You load up a tray with silver and head for the line. One side is a cold-case buffet filled with sandwiches and pastries, which you get at with a pair of impeccably designed plastic tongs. The other side is where you get the hot food, dished up by a real live chef. The Swedes haven’t perfected a substitute for that just yet. Give them time.

Now, when I say most of the food comes from Sweden, I mean just that. When you eat a piece of cheese on the Swedish platter, that crispy bread the Swedes call knackebrod comes from a company called Leksand, the cheese is Swedish Ambrosia, the herring comes from a tin, the lingonberries from a bottle, the smoked salmon from the North Sea and the smoked reindeer meat--hey, pal, we aren’t talking Sonoma County.

Some of this stuff is addictive. The reindeer is lean and delicious, and the herring, red and pungent in tiny hunks, positively terrific. If you’ve ever had an authentic Swedish smorgas , or sandwich, you’ll recognize the shrimp sandwich to be the real article, too. It’s open-faced on real Swedish rye, with lots of eggy mayo, a leaf of Boston lettuce and half a hard-boiled egg piled high with tiny shrimp. (Don’t expect a lot of flavor--Burbank is a long way from the Gulf of Bothnia.)

The hot dishes are amazing, especially the prices. Nothing is more than $6, and everything comes with new potatoes and good mixed vegetables. There are thick slices of medium-rare roast beef in gravy and chunks of surprisingly good poached salmon.

Kottbullar , the famous Swedish meatballs, are available every day and cost only $3, an amount that won’t get you a Pepsi-Cola in Stockholm today. What you get here is a big plate of tiny meatballs--oh, say nine or 10, depending on how you hit it off with the chef--plus about three new potatoes (skins still on, of course), a pile of lingonberries and a puddle of ketchup-thick brown gravy, which slowly turns red as the juice from the berries oozes across the plate. When I lived in Sweden in 1969, I survived almost exclusively on this dish, and I’m still around today.

The best part is dessert. Anyone who has ever been to Sweden has seen what the Swedes call princess cake, a bizarre green cake the color of Kermit the Frog. The frosting is marzipan, and inside there are layers of white cake, whipped cream and brandied raisins. Ikea’s version is delicious, albeit a little dry.

There are lots of other desserts here, all baked fresh daily on the premises: Swedish apple cake with vanilla sauce, cardamom-flavored cinnamon rolls, apple lingonberry crisp topped with more thick whipped cream. There’s good Lofberg coffee, also packaged in Sweden, to wash them down with.

The expression “you can’t eat the furniture” will never sound the same to me again.

Suggested dishes: Swedish meatballs, $3; Swedish platter, $5; Nordic salmon, $6; princess cake, $1.95; cinnamon roll, 95 cents.

Ikea, 600 N. San Fernando Blvd., Burbank, (818) 842-4532. Store hours 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays; cafeteria closes about half an hour before the store. Parking garage. Beer and wine. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $10 to $15.