Never mind the furniture, check out the food - the Ikea restaurant experience is catching on, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin
Ikea has been filling German homes for more than 30 years and now the Swedish furniture giant is filling German stomachs - lots of them.
It's just before 9am and a tired, huddled mass waits impatiently in the sub-zero Berlin morning, dwarfed by the giant blue box of one of Germany's newest Ikea stores. It's located, literally, on the wrong side of the tracks, outside the ring train line around the city and a busy motorway in the working-class neighbourhood of Berlin Tempelhof. Vehicles are filling up the car-park and the waiting crowd begins to swell.
Precisely at 9am, the glass doors swish open and the crowd hurries up the escalator. On the first floor of the blue box is Ikea Germany's largest restaurant. There is room for 640 diners and, within minutes, the tables are full. They have come in their hundreds for the "Swedish breakfast": two bread rolls, cheese, cold meat, jam, butter and smoked salmon plus all the coffee you can drink for the princely sum of €1.50.
It's not exactly breakfast at Tiffany's, but nobody's complaining.
"I don't know how they do it and I don't care - €1.50 is amazing value. Being able to drink as much coffee as you want is what makes it worthwhile," says Werner Mauer, a shy widower in his late 50s who comes here several times a week. He sees many of the same faces every morning but, in the past months, the popularity of the Ikea breakfast has spread, he says.
"There's sometimes a bit of shoving at the counter when they open at 9am because people are afraid that they'll run out of bread rolls. But that's never happened as long as I've been coming here," he says.
On average, around 1,000 people breakfast from 9am to 11am at Ikea Tempelhof each morning, downing more than 3,000 bread rolls and 3,000 cups of coffee. The restaurant opens half an hour before the main store but 9.30am comes and goes and nobody stirs, contradicting the maxim: "Whose wine I drink, his song I sing."
"I don't like Ikea stuff - the expensive stuff you can get better and cheaper elsewhere, and the cheap stuff is rubbish," says Mauer.
The restaurant is a Berlin biotope of pensioners, single mothers, unemployed men, even a group from a special needs school - all sitting on Ikea furniture, eating Ikea food from Ikea plates. At one of the prized window tables, Sieglind and Wolfgang Franke sit in silence. Both in their early 60s, he reads his paper while she fishes uneaten smoked salmon off his plate.
"We come here four or five times a week," says Sieglind. "It gets us out of the house. I don't think Ikea expects people to buy in the store but they must still make a profit, even at €1.50."
The restaurant is a central part of the Ikea experience, strategically located where the first-floor furniture display leads down to the ground-floor market hall of small items. Frazzled shoppers with hyperactive children can have a meatball dish for €3.90 or salmon with vegetables and potatoes for €5. The children's dish, pasta with tomato sauce, costs just €1. A piece of apple pie costs 50 cent.
Every 20th euro spent in one of Germany's 37 Ikea stores goes on food, putting the furniture company in 11th place on the list of Germany's best-earning food companies. There's free stuff too, such as jars of baby food and nappies.
In Berlin, where one in five is out of work, the three Ikea stores have become a kind of social centre, where people drop the children into the creche and sit in the restaurant for a few hours.
A long trawl finally finds a couple planning on going shopping in Ikea after breakfast, Antje and Karl-Erich Beerbaum. Like others, they are amazed by the value and the all-you-can-drink coffee.
"Breakfast can be so expensive elsewhere. Sometimes when I get the bill for €6 I wonder what I had, then I see that it was nearly all coffee," says Antje. "The atmosphere here is so pleasant. It's in the middle of the city, not out in the middle of nowhere, but the people who come here just for breakfast are mad. I suppose they like to have the feeling they've got a good deal."
Breakfast over, the diners have a chance to walk off their meal. You can't just leave the store, you have to pass through the entire lower floor, including the last 10 metres before the cash registers, notorious for being piled high with impractical, profitable junk.
Ikea employees say that the €1.50 breakfast is sold at cost price, something that could make things interesting if the bargain-hunting Irish eat through enough Swedish breakfasts to eat into the company's profits when it eventually opens here.
Back in the Ikea restaurant, employee Mandy is visiting from another Berlin branch. She remembers how one elderly couple visited the restaurant every Saturday morning without fail.
"In the end she died, but he still came every Saturday even though he could hardly walk. Then one morning he said he didn't feel very well. It appeared he was having a heart attack," she says. "We wanted to take him to a quiet room and call a taxi to take him to hospital. But he refused to go until he'd finished his €1.50 breakfast."