The Worst Food From IKEA's Food Court: What To Avoid Ordering On Your Trip

IKEA is known for one thing: furniture. No, wait! Meatballs! It's actually quite annoying that a retailer can be an icon of both food and the chairs that you sit on to eat it. But that's exactly the case with IKEA. A trip to IKEA simply isn't complete without a stop at its food court for some of its Scandinavian-inspired offerings. While the store is best known for its Swedish meatballs, served with mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, and lingonberry jam, that's far from the only dish on the menu.

The options are plentiful, but can the retailer possibly be doing all of them well in addition to the Bestå and the Jättebo? According to Tasting Table's own list of IKEA's food court menu items ranked worst to best, the answer is a regrettable no. It probably comes as no shock that the Swedish meatballs were our taster's No. 1 pick, but it may be slightly surprising that the worst food item from IKEA's food court that you should avoid on your next trip is the Caesar salad.

Did you even know IKEA's food court serves Caesar salad? Therein seems to lie the problem. According to our taster, there "just wasn't anything special about IKEA's version" of a Caesar salad, and everyone knows that being ordinary is sometimes worse than being actively bad. At least bad dishes make people feel something. But there was so much about IKEA's Caesar that just didn't pass muster.

IKEA's website lists the ingredients of its Caesar salad as "romaine lettuce, shredded Parmesan, and homestyle croutons." There's not much to it, and while Caesar salad is generally a fairly simple dish, it can be delicious with the right ingredients. It simply doesn't seem like IKEA prioritizes its Caesar salad — rather it seems like something that's on the menu just to be on the menu.

According to our taster, the romaine lettuce wasn't crispy enough, there wasn't much flavor to the Parmesan, and the croutons were "merely fine." As you can also see in our taster's picture, it comes with prepackaged dressing. There's a reason why Caesar salads taste so much better in restaurants; it often comes down to the quality of the dressing. All of these traits combined form the impression that the Caesar salad is an afterthought on IKEA's menu, an item put there more out of convenience than anything else.

In searching for online reviews of IKEA's Caesar salad, we practically came up dry. There's no cult following for this Caesar salad, not even a small fan base of people evangelizing it ironically. As far as we can tell, it doesn't even come with the option to add chicken, and everyone knows a grilled chicken Caesar salad is generally a reliable standby. The unreliable, forgettable nature of the IKEA Caesar salad seems to be the worst thing about it and the reason it falls in last place on our ranking of the retailer's food court items.