GIMME! Vol. 2: The Bent 'n' Dent Poets Department
Plus IKEA meatballs, shoppy-shops, nostalgia, and treat taxonomy.
What a month! Taylor Swift wore a watch around her neck, announced a new album (more on that below), and won the super bowl. Valentine’s Day happened on a Wednesday as if to openly dare us to not celebrate the holiday that’s only like 15% real anyway. Are you a sucker who celebrates love when prompted by marketing like a pathetic little capitalist Pavlov’s dog? Sound off in the comments (I am)!
This month’s Post-Valentine’s Day Spectacular features an entry from writer/performer/podcaster/dear friend Maggie Smith. Maggie and I met an actual full decade ago, in 2014, when we began working at the same Chris Farley-themed Hard Rock Cafe called The Second City. We started the same week and people were always mixing the two of us up because they couldn’t comprehend the idea of two brunette women with M names, even though that’s the literal plot of the movie Martha Marcy May Marlene (haven’t seen it). Since then, Maureen—I mean, Maggie—has become a fellow LA-dwelling creative and co-hosts the podcast Roommate Lovers with her roommate Kyle Mantegna, who is also her husband. This month Maggie is kind enough to share her curated guide to the most romantic restaurant in Los Angeles-technically-Burbank: IKEA. Ta bort det, Maggie!
How to Have a Dinner Date at IKEA
by Maggie Smith
With another Valentine’s Day come and gone, there’s one thing we all can’t stop thinking about.
Balls.
Obviously, I’m talking about Swedish meatballs, and where I’m from (Earth), the literal only place to get your Swedish meatballs fix is the monolithic, all-caps, flat-pack furniture superstore, IKEA. That’s right, IKEA is more than just a pretty blue and yellow face—it’s also the best restaurant in town. And just because Valentine’s Day has passed, doesn’t mean you can’t still treat your boo to a night out on the town! The town in this scenario being a series of perfectly manicured showrooms and a sexy, cavernous warehouse. So grab your honey and a comfortable pair of shoes, and get ready to ball so hard.
Here are some DO’S and DON’TS for having a dinner date at IKEA:
DO become an IKEA Family Member
You get some good delivery options and 90 day protections bla bla bla whatever, who cares, but MOSTLY, you get free coffee at the restaurant!!!!! Your date is going to feel taken care of knowing they can drink as much coffee as they want with their meatballs.
DO bring your laptop
IKEA has free wifi, so why not use this date as an opportunity to get some work done?
DON’T go to IKEA on the first weekend of the month
Similar to the cicada, most humans emerge into IKEA only at certain points in their life cycles. For humans, it’s when they have to move. Unless you want to be swarmed with these human cicadas, avoid entering IKEA on the first weekend of any month at all costs. These stressed out amateurs only go to IKEA “when” they “need” “furniture.” They spend the day searching for VISKAFORS and ÄPPLARYD, and only go to the restaurant to shove some balls in, not to enjoy the balls. Who would want to have a date to a place like that?
DO look at IKEA’s discount days
These deals include “Meatless Monday,” where any veggie/plant ball entree is $3 (going vegan in front of a date is a great power move) or “Kids eat free Wednesdays” (which is perfect for if you want your kids to be on the date with you).
DON’T forget your giant reusable blue IKEA bag
As if you ever would!
DO dress up
Just because you’re technically at a furniture store doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dress up for your date. Would it kill you to fix your hair a little?
DO bring your compost
IKEA is moving towards becoming a zero waste restaurant, so help them out by bringing as many old banana peels as you can!!
DON’T forget to visit the showroom floor
You might be there for balls, but the showroom floor is the perfect place for an after-dinner stroll. Drink in every detail, and be vocal about what you like. You don’t want to consider moving forward with someone who prefers JÄTTEBO over the TARVA collection.
DO go to the As-Is section before you leave
Even if you don’t find a slightly damaged HEMNES or a recently returned VADSÖ to take home for yourself, the As-Is section is a romantic place to snuggle up witcha boo on a deeply discounted HYLTARP and watch the pothos plants die.
DO get after-dinner hot dogs at the IKEA bistro
IKEA has not one but TWO eateries. You might think you’re full from eating balls, but you can fit some wieners in, too. I mean, could you skip getting gelato in Naples? Would you not eat an entire deep dish pizza in Chicago?? No. So you can’t not couldn’t be not eating 1-5 hot dogs at the IKEA Bistro on your way out. BONUS: Your date will be impressed by how casually you throw around cash, considering they recently raised the hot dog price from $1.25 to $1.75.
Follow these simple do’s and don’ts and your date will be saying, “Tack för den bästa dejten någonsin!” And remember, you can’t spell “Swedish meatballs” without “heart.” Mostly.
The Bent ‘N’ Dent Poets Department: A Love Letter To Supermarket Fancy
by Me, Maureen Monahan
I live in Los Angeles, a city that is many things. It’s a beautiful Eden of hills and lush greenery, lovingly restored old movie houses, great Japanese, Mexican, Armenian, Thai, and Korean food, and kitschy-ass mid-century apartment buildings that I love, including the one that I live in with my boyfriend, who I love, too. It’s also a land overrun by cars, the entire city pathetically bent over the knee of American car culture, its bare ass smacked raw by traffic and carbon emissions and low-density isolation; a city home to some of the objectively worst human beings on earth and their principal deity, the Entertainment Industry; a city with a certain soulless je ne sais quoi that makes one feel like they’re living in the mall from Dawn Of The Dead (2004) except all the stores are either pilates studios or specialty “shoppy-shop” boutiques selling $18 Fishwife sardines, and all the zombies won’t stop recommending hikes to you. You gotta take the good with the bad.
And don’t get me wrong, I love a good shoppy-shop. They’re tidily arranged and pleasing to the eye, like a boutique art gallery where some of the art has Rancho Gordo beans inside. They’re clutch for bulking up an underwhelming birthday gift. Their staff, totally unburdened by the stressors of running a real store, are usually warm and friendly. The clientele are surprisingly unfussy—odds are they’re either shopping for a fabulously thrown-together dinner party, nary a care in the world, or locked into a silent existential crisis where you just need to stare at jars of fancy olives for a bit before you can re-engage with reality. There’s one down the street from me where I can buy exactly three ounces of beautiful guanciale so my aforementioned boyfriend can make exactly three servings of carbonara (one serving each, then a third shared portion to be probably eaten straight from the pan). Shoppy shops, unlike cars, are an essential part of a major city’s ecosystem because we all need places where, on a rough day, we can buy some artisan bullshit and pretend it’s groceries.
But just as a sweaty hike in October makes me yearn for crisp Midwestern autumn of my youth, or closing out at a “bar,” with a 10pm last call makes me yearn for the windowless dives of Chicago, the shoppy-shops of Los Angeles awaken in me a yearning for DJ’s Bent ‘N’ Dent.
The Bent ‘N’ Dent was situated near the outer limits of my hometown (Beloit, Wisconsin, if you’re nasty) where the air held a permanent bonfire smell from people burning piles of dead leaves in their yards. Its closest major landmarks were the time capsule of a roller rink called the Skatin’ Station and the public park where I practiced soccer in high school. But the Bent ‘N’ Dent was like a beautiful geode: rough on the outside with stained siding and crumbly parking lot, but inside packed to the brim with a wealth of exotic curios and luxurious treasures: boxes of fancy cookies, cans of coconut water and mango nectar, long prisms of Toblerone, jars of sun dried tomato pesto, Senseo brand cappuccino pods. If you could find it in a bougie housewife’s pantry in 2002, you could sure as hell find it at the Bent ‘N’ Dent in 2009. And, as was right there in the name, you could find it at the Bent ‘N’ Dent because it was a little fucked up somehow: dented, damaged, past it’s sell-by date, or in suspiciously pristine condition that suggested the product was just plain gross. My aunt Joanie worked there for a bit as a cashier, and would greet me with an “Ooh, whadja find?” as I dumped my armful of decadent treasures on the conveyor belt. And I’d drive off in my 1999 Chevy Lumina, which was a color known to the eye as “beige” but to my friends and me as “champagne,” feeling like Anna Damn Wintour herself.
Plenty has been written about the rise of the shoppy-shop and their bevy of artisan foodstuffs: Graza olive oil, Banza pasta, Momofuku instant noodles. Less has been said about the subset of consumable behind much of the Bent ‘N’ Dent’s allure—that which is not exactly luxury, but more so luxury-themed, a category of consumable that can most succinctly be summed up as “supermarket-fancy” (patent pending). There’s Toblerone of course, but also shiny foil-wrapped Ghirardelli squares. There are Moser Roth and Choceur, which I learned are both exclusive to Aldi stores. There’s Ferrero Rocher, perhaps the only chocolate candy on the market that could be accurately classified as “serving cunt.” The gold foil and dainty pleated cups? Come on!
Of all the luxurious supermarket-fancy treats I coveted growing up, the queen was Vienetta, the impossibly elegant ice cream dessert that was sometimes served at Joanie’s house on holidays. It was always an adults-only dessert, too fancy for the kids, which obviously made it way more alluring. When I finally finagled a bite, I think it was the single best bite of food I’d ever had. While the artisan products of a shoppy shop slum it with a sort of aw-shucks humility (“Who, us? We’re just humble fish wives, stinky from the docks, our nets brimming with Fly By Jing Chili Crisp Smoked Salmon”), supermarket-fancy goods play into a gold-foil fantasy of wealth. The loaf of vanilla ice cream and “crisp chocolate-flavored wafers” could easily have been called “ChocoFreeze Delite,” but it’s instead it’s Vienetta: elegant, lacey, something Salieri could’ve stuffed his face with in Amadeus. To paraphrase Vladimir Nabokov, it’s the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Vien. Ett. Ta.
See also: Hershey Symphony bars, Royal Dansk butter cookies in their various shapes and famous blue tins somehow universally repurposed for sewing supplies, Walker’s Shortbread in chunky little bars that look and taste like sticks of pure butter. Pepperidge Farm is a heavy hitter of supermarket-fancy: Milano cookies and their array of sub-flavors like raspberry and mint, the latter of which is inexplicably burned into my brain as a detail in the Matthew McConnaughey rom-com Failure To Launch, wherein they’re the only thing a heartbroken Sarah Jessica Parker can bring herself to eat (how chic!). The Pepperidge harvest also yields the very European-seeming Chessman cookies; Brussels, Milano’s crispier, unsung cookie sister; and Pirouettes, the delicate batons that flawlessly double as pretend cigarette holders. Not to mention their line of frozen ready-made desserts like coconut cake, which I’ve never tried but that comes recommended from the queen Amy Sedaris herself. All display the hallmarks of Supermarket Fancy: elegant packaging, names that vaguely evoke Europe or some nicer part of America, and prices that are the gentlest of splurges (Chips Ahoy, for example, go for about 25 cents per ounce, where Pepperidge Farm cookies hover in the 40-55 cent range).
Where the design of a supermarket-fancy item might boast a touch of plaid or a whisper of cursive, shoppy-shop merchandise—similar to the great book cover blob craze of the late 2010’s—all sort of look the same, with an aesthetic you could call “minimalist kokopelli” (possibly because a lot of them are designed by the exact same company). If Vienetta were rebranded for shoppy-shops, it would be named something like “Cream God” and it would look like this:
This has been independently verified by my personal board of scientists and thought leaders.
I wish there were more stores like Bent ‘N’ Dent, but I guess they’re sort of rare. A quick search yields a small sprinkling of “grocery outlet” stores across the greater Los Angeles metro area, but there’s no indication as to whether they boast the same supermarket-fancy allure that Bent ‘N’ Dent once did. How could it possibly? I was 16, chomping half-price hazelnut Pirouettes like they were cigars, dreaming of being an adult living in an apartment in a big city. Now I am an adult living in an apartment in a big city and I’m no less susceptible to fantasy. I hope I can own a home someday. I once gave in and bought a tin of Fishwife smoked salmon from my local shoppy shop; it tasted fine but it felt special and the special-ness felt good.
As can be verified through a quick scroll through TikTok or Instagram, my generation has leaned hard into “I deserve a little treat” culture, and as the world seems to indifferently close in around us with its ghastly carousel of horrors wrought by Ronald Reagan’s legacy—or worse, our very own elected officials—who can blame us? We do deserve a damn treat! But I don’t think the treat is actually the treat itself—the $14 chili crisp or the delicate cookies—or even the vague fantasies of wealth that come with it. The treat is the feeling of deserving something. It’s like mindfulness put through a capitalist funhouse mirror. This isn’t just a log of Toblerone or a $10 bag of heirloom beans. It’s a treat. I want it, and I bought it with my own money, because I decided that I deserve it. It’s not just a wealth fantasy, it’s microdosing dignity. And until we overthrow the government and install Greta Thunberg as our benevolent dictator, it’ll have to do. You deserve a treat, be it supermarket fancy or shoppy-shop chic, and everything that makes the treat a treat.
(Surprise! It’s a new feature where we recommend stuff we liked this month. I considered promoting this up top but decided to make it a surprise, to reward you for the loyalty and diligence you exhibited in scrolling all the way to the end the post. Enjoy!)
This recipe for “speedy no-knead bread” from NYT Cooking. It’s been raining a lot in LA lately, which allows me to lightly cosplay as “cozy,” and this bread is huge for that. It’s an EVEN EASIER version of the already easy-ish bread and it comes together in four hours, which is like lightning speed in bread terms. Just make sure you use the recipe in the video (the one with red wine vinegar) and not the one listed in the article. Good bread!! - MM
Lagunitas Hoppy Refreshers: I didn’t do Dry January, but I have definitely cut back on drinking significantly in recent months simply because I’ve discovered it makes me feel increasingly physically shitty as I enter my twilight years of “early 30’s.” These little cans of citrussy hoppy sparkling water are sold near the NA beer but they’re less a beer substitute and more a seltzer upgrade. They taste good and make your stomach feel neutral-to-good, which is really all you can ask of any beverage.
The Traitors on Peacock. Some would call it a reality competition show, I’d call it the Alan Cumming fashion experience, sponsored by Lady MacBeth. - Maggie Smith
Going.com is an email service that sends you cheap flight alerts, and acts as a constant reminder that even at $500 off, you can’t afford to go on vacation. - Maggie Smith
Established Titles: Did you know that if you own even a tiny amount of land in Scotland you LEGALLY are a lord or a lady? At this website, you can purchase a tiny plot of land in Scotland to not only claim your title, but help preservation efforts, and finally begin our re-colonization of the United Kingdom. - Maggie Smith
Justice Ninja Style: In 1985, the town of De Soto, MO banded together to create this one-of-a-kind should-be-classic film which also serves as a sort of promo for the local karate studio. One of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen (albeit unintentionally), yet also the most authentic embodiment of the spirit of independent filmmaking you’re likely to stumble across. - Sean Tiffin
Maureen- this is entertaining. I admit I've always loved IKEA's meatballs. But now with this take, I'll be looking at an IKEA visit entirely differently (and maybe even braving a dinner date?) :)