Photo Gallery: IKEA Celebrates Spring with Smorgasbord

When it comes to IKEA, the majority of people fall firmly into one of two camps. 

There are, of course, the haters. They resent IKEA for its outlandish size, it's mass-produced whimsy, and that stupid track that wrests away their power of free will and compels them to march through every last section of store. Even gardening. Even when they want nothing less in this world than to purchase an office fern.

Then, there are the IKEA disciples, the ones who dliligently replicate the store's show room floors in their own domiciles, like Edward Norton before he finds out he's also Brad Pitt. They love it for its reasonably priced nightstands, its spunky ice cube trays and most importantly, the sense of accomplishment they feel after assembling a legitimate piece of furniture with little more then a flimsy metal twig and their own perceived ingenuity.

What could possibly bridge these two disparate groups together? The same thing that unites all people with irreconcilable personality differences, of course: food. Specifically, the IKEA Spring Smorgasbord, an all-you-can-eat buffet that cost attendees a mere $10 per ticket.

The smorgasbord was held on Friday evening, and they weren't just being cute with the name: nearly 500 people were crushed into the store's modestly sized restaurant area, and everyone, young and old, IKEA savvy or not, was bent before a hulking, delicious looking plate of food.

As it turns out, many of the smorgasbord's attendees are regulars at the restaurant, and come to the store without even the pretext of shopping for furniture.

College Park residents Kate and David Hamrum, the latter of whom is of Swedish descent, come to eat at the IKEA restaurant relatively often. They said that though the food doesn't quite measure up to the fare available in the old country, they were still intrigued by the buffet's variety, which included, among other things, three types of herring. "I'm all about all you can eat," David said.

Converting power shoppers into leisurely patrons is the whole idea, said IKEA College Park's Chef Chris Schreibar. 

"The concept is to keep you guys here longer, because what we found out is, when you spend two hours shopping in the store, you tend to get hungry," he said. "It’s a big store, right? So my job is to provide the food to keep you guys here longer; provide a day out for the whole family.

It's a manipulative approach, but it works. All around me, people were happily munching on pink hunks of poached salmon, potatoes au gratin, and Swedish meatballs. Schreibar said the menu for such a feast strives to maintain Swedish authenticity while inspiring people to push the boundaries of their culinary comfort zones.

"Maybe somebody who has never tried herring before might try it for the first time here … or poached salmon, or even Swedish meatballs," he said.

Encouraging such risk-taking seems antithetical to IKEA's marketing ethos. Are these really the same people who sold me my press-board cube bookshelf? The one I plucked off a neatly packaged stack of 15 others that looked exactly like it?

Who knows. Check out IKEA's next smorgasbord on June 17 and let me know what you think.