Last week, I rearranged my office alone, thanks to 96 linear inches of IKEA desk that amount to featherweight. This movability is the attractiveness of the flat-pack-yet-stylish sensibilities of IKEA, of which I am a target demographic. I don’t need my LINNMON to last forever, though we’re now in our third office since purchasing it. I need it to look good and be lightweight and affordable, and I need to be able to eat meatballs immediately before I buy it. It’s a short list of asks, and IKEA answers the call.
Accordingly, “You’re invited to the ultimate ask,” announced the menu card at the four-night, sold-out Tulsmå dinner series helmed by chef collective Et Al. in collaboration with the mysterious Tulsa Loves IKEA campaign, a partnership between several city organizations, announced in mid-May.
The premise of the campaign is that—if Tulsa asks in the most creative way possible—will IKEA build a store here? The answer? TBD. But if you’re going to, as chef Chloe Butler put it in her dinner toast, “show IKEA what Tulsa can do,” Et Al., a masterclass in dynamism, is who you need to recruit for help. The handful of chefs who put together the menu have tackled Japanese, Eastern Mediterranean, French, and Southern American cuisines, among others, and for Sweden, they stepped up as well.
Tulsmå was as much immersive performance art as dinner, with the Gathering Place’s ONEOK Vista at the Boathouse fully transformed by custom restaurant branding (with food illustrations for each course in the menu) and furnished with decor and dishware by IKEA. An elegant dinner inspired by a furniture store cafeteria? Formidable, but steeped in mischief. The Christopher Walken of pop-up restaurants.
It was a joyful evening, with long, banquet tables of communal dishes, the room made warm through the implicit buy-in to the concept by everyone in attendance, everyone being a little serious about being silly. Every of-age diner was poured a shot of Aquavit—a Scandinavian spirit with a very pronounced caraway flavor—in a tiny red Solo cup, a fine introduction to the aggressive whimsy of the six courses to follow.
First, Smorgasbord, maybe the most easily recognizable Swedish cuisine by name and by composition. Tulsmå’s take danced around the roots of the buffet-style offering: fresh sourdough bread, rye crackers, pork sausage with juniper, and a terrine of butter with radish slices served in a portion size so opulent I insisted on keeping it with me throughout the meal, just in case. This collection of dishes established a pattern for an evening of inspiration, not mimicry, of taking a ball and running straight off the field with it. Ex: one of the board proteins was a distinctly Japanese-feeling fried smelt with yuzu that didn’t seem out of place, somehow.
The Green Country course was another riff on an IKEA cafeteria staple: gravlax, or cured salmon. I’ve eaten this at IKEA, and I’ve eaten it at Tulsmå. The former taught me not to order salmon at a cafeteria in Frisco, Texas, while the latter rendered me silent for a solid thirty seconds after my first bite of salmon coated with chopped dill, topped with herbed creme fraiche (which I’ve been lovingly referring to as “uppity ranch” in regaling this meal to others), and placed atop the “spring onion flatbread,” more a Chinese-style scallion pancake with a flaky, fried exterior. It was rich on rich and rich, very nearly a dessert if it weren’t made of fish and onions. It came with two salads to break up the fat: a butter lettuce with an herb dressing and a marinated cucumber and fennel mixture with coarsely ground juniper berries that, in this treatment, tasted like flakes of peppercorn.
If you’ve never shopped at IKEA, know that while there’s a full cafeteria in the entrance, there’s also a snack bar at the exit with foods that make more sense at a big box store: pizza, pretzels, and that bastion of a long day of shopping, the hot dog. I’m invested in the hot dog as an art form and as cultural commentary, in the corporate battle between Sam’s Club and Costco, in the Korean corn dog trend, and in the idea that other sausages can be important, but for whatever reason we malign this one. I even anchored a vacation last year around a hot button dog that was $29 … and worth every penny.
Condolences to New York City (which already has its own IKEA in Brooklyn anyway!!), because the third course, Hot Dog, was better than that one I paid $30 and traveled 1,300 miles for. The person seated across from me heard loud and clear the snap of the first bite, even as it was wrapped in a Norwegian-style potato flatbread. The condiments were a trio of plot twists, with bright pink pickled cabbage instead of standard kraut, crispy shallots instead of raw onion, and a Chinese-ish hot mustard that hurt to eat on its own but made the hot dog into something I have now devoted two paragraphs to. Even if the chef who helmed this hot dog made only hot dogs for the rest of his career—reportedly he’s one of the newer additions to the Et Al. collective—I think he might become famous.
Course four, the iconic Meatball, is maybe the food thing IKEA does best. This was a drastic change in format from the gumball-sized meatballs I know (and love in context but not really outside the store because they’re just okay), with a single large meatball made of local bison and pork seated atop a potato puree and topped with frizzled leeks and Swedish “meatball sauce,” a particular cream gravy I’ve never seen on any other dish. It was the dish that came closest to the cafeteria version in flavor and style, complete with a Tulsan-Swedish flag sticking out. It was adorable and necessary for the theme, though it was difficult for me to eat several ounces of ground meat with gravy right after housing a hot dog.
I managed to sample two desserts after it, though. The Rice Pudding course was a simple, fragrant jasmine rice topped with a super-tart strawberry elderflower jam and a bergamot whipped cream. Floral desserts generally send me running for the hills, and I ate most of this one. Props to Et Al. for deft usage of potentially overwhelming flavors—the caraway in rye, the juniper in kraut, and here the combo of jasmine and elderflower introduced just enough that I could tell what I was eating, but it tasted like food instead of perfume.
Maybe the final course, the Swedish Pancake Cake, was a wink and nod to the end of an IKEA shopping trip, where you take the tags of all the things you liked on display and find them in tall, neat stacks of boxes. These crepe-like pancakes were spread alternately with pastry cream and the second IKEA must-eat, a lingonberry jam, cut here with raspberries. Like me at IKEA, I was tired by the end and took most of it boxed up to-go.
With a theme like this it’d be easy to slip into decadence for the sake of decadence or extravagance for the sake of extravagance, but I can’t name an element of any dish that didn’t belong or wasn’t placed with intention. Additionally, something Et Al. does extremely well that maybe isn’t touted enough is wine pairing. A highlight was back-to-back pours of Sangiovese wines from California’s Stolpman Vineyards. The first was a carbonically fermented version, crispy and light in tannins, paired with the hot dog course; the second was a traditional, darker, richer version of the same grape that helped along the meatball and gravy. Subtly brilliant and totally cheeky sequencing.
The entire meal service was around two-and-a-half hours, which is also about how long it takes to navigate an IKEA store, and for me, it raised a lot of new questions: Does there have to be a line between serious and funny? How much butter can I eat in a single sitting? Is Tulsa a hot dog city? Will we get an IKEA, whether or not as a result of this campaign? I don’t know, but Tulsmå left me feeling grateful for the ask.
