The most interesting conversation about how India eats this year did not happen in a restaurant, it happened in a furniture store, between a Mumbai restaurateur who once furnished his first café with mattresses, and a food manager whose team were regarded as the best sofa sellers. Speaking on democratic dining and what makes a great dining experience, it started, like every good food story, with a simple question: what makes people want to stay?
Long before democratic dining became a conversation, India had already figured it out. The dhaba, the Irani café, the neighbourhood chai tapri – places where the table was never quite yours alone, where strangers shared space and opinions on cricket, politics, and everything in between.
And then there is IKEA, which has spent roughly 80 years proving that the surest way to sell a sofa is to feed the person sitting on it.
What makes a dining experience truly democratic?
At IKEA IKONIC in Mumbai, that idea got aired. Restaurateur Riyaaz Amlani and IKEA India’s country food manager Kevin Johnson sat down to talk about democratic dining, and what actually makes a dining experience memorable. Ten minutes in, they discovered they were operating from a shared philosophy – the truest test of a restaurant is how long people want to be there.
Kevin Johnson, IKEA India’s country food manager, is disarmingly candid about the logic. “Founder Ingvar Kamprad called the food team his best sofa sellers, and the numbers back him up: a customer who eats in the restaurant spends 30 percent more on home furnishing. “We don’t need to make a profit,” Kevin says. “We are here to sell home furnishings.” Any surplus goes back into lowering prices. Food, in his telling, is an integral part of IKEA, and the reason people linger. He sees a wider shift behind it, too. “As a society, we’re going back to wanting to have contact with other human beings,” he says, and the restaurants are getting fuller for it.
Riyaaz, who’s spent a career on the other side of the pass, shared a different but connected perspective that anyone can make something brilliant with an unlimited budget. Value, he says, is the feeling of getting more than you paid for, and creating that feeling is one of the hardest design problems there is. The enemy isn’t cheap or simple. It’s ordinary: things that carry no meaning. A steel plate, a cutting chai glass, and a plastic stool all mean something the moment they’re in context.
The same rules that shape the furniture at IKEA shape the menu. Start with a price, as low as it can go. Then look at design, sustainability, and simplicity, a Swedish value that Kevin says runs through everything, so a food space at IKEA is never overwhelming. That is his definition of democratic dining: affordability first, and because it’s affordable, it’s also accessible.
A little bit Swedish, a little bit ‘Swedesi’
In India, this plays out through what he calls a “Swedesi” menu, roughly half Swedish and half designed for the country it’s in. Everything is made locally, so it can be tuned to local tastes: a hot dog with a little more spice, meatballs that taste slightly different. When meatballs, salmon and falafel were paired with Indian sauces, sales of those dishes shot up 500 percent. It works as a gateway. Try Sweden with a familiar sauce today, and next time you might try it without.
What today’s diner really wants from a meal
It also says something about what diners want now. We want the buzz of a beautifully designed room with the ease of a familiar one, a meal that feels special without needing an occasion, and an experience that surprises us without making us feel out of place. Somewhere between the plastic stool and the tasting menu, a new kind of diner has emerged: one who wants to be surprised and looked after at the same time.
That’s where the Swedish concept of *Fika* finds a natural home. More than a coffee break, Fika is a ritual of pausing, sharing something to eat or drink, and making time for one another. The value of a meal isn’t always in how elaborate it is, but in what it makes possible.
At its heart, IKEA is an invitation to sit together. And with some of the most delicious meatballs, the freshest salmon and “Swedesi” dishes we can’t get enough of, it turns out the seller of sofas has quietly been in the business of community all along.
