What is a good place to eat in Helsinki?

Question

I'm flying to Finland next month and haven't been there since I was born (so quite a while) and I don't remember anything from while I was there so any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

the helsinki steak house...........that place is the bomb

Answer 2

Ask eidur gudjohnsen

Answer 3

never been there

Answer 4

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July 16, 2006
Helsinki’s Shining Season
By R.W. APPLE Jr.
“THIS reminds me of ‘La Grande Jatte,’ ” my wife, Betsey, said one sunny day, watching the blondes, male and female, soaking up the rays on the grassy, flower-flecked central strip that divides the Esplanade, Helsinki’s smartest shopping street. “The only thing missing is the parasols.”

Don’t try Helsinki in the off season, no matter what the brochures say. The Finnish capital’s time is now, right now, high summer, when daylight lasts for 20 giddy hours out of 24, when the sidewalk cafes and the waterside markets are thronged by handsome, hardy people, when the procession of crayfish feasts builds toward a climax, and when the pale blue waters of the lakes and the harbor and the white bark of the birch trees match the national flag.

Seen at its radiant best, Helsinki can be hypnotic. It has held me in its thrall for decades with its genius for modern design, displayed in textiles by Marimekko, ceramics by Arabia and glassware by Iittala, created by the likes of Kaj Franck, Timo Sarpaneva, Tapio Wirkkala, Alvar Aalto and Eliel Saarinen, to say nothing of those nifty orange-handled scissors made by Fiskars. Some names are less familiar than they should be — Aalto stands, in my view at least, with Wright, Mies and Le Corbusier at the apex of 20th-century architecture — but certainly not through any fault of their own.

For a time, the tradition seemed moribund, but it proved to be only dormant. Marimekko, whose chic, simple frocks Jacqueline Kennedy prized, has found a fresh new streak of creativity; the work of young and not-so-young designers from around the world (like the witty Briton Tom Dixon at Artek) can be seen in Finnish cutlery and furniture; and a sparkling new design district has come into being to show it off.

A nation of barely 5,250,000 souls (compare Wisconsin, with 5,536,000), where most people speak a language that is a distant cousin of Hungarian and largely incomprehensible to other Europeans, Finland — and Helsinki, its cultural, commercial and political center — has had to work hard to make its mark. It has succeeded beyond any rational expectations, not in a single sphere but in many.

The Finnish sauna has conquered the world, as have Finnish athletes from the distance runner Paavo Nurmi to the hockey star Teemu Selanne to the Formula One driver Mika Hakkinen. Nokia mobile phones are used in every corner of the globe. Grasping the classical torch from the great composer Jean Sibelius, Finnish musicians have ranged far from their remote Nordic base — Esa-Pekka Salonen reigning as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Karita Mattila as a prima donna in the great opera houses of New York, London, San Francisco, Paris and Vienna.

Yet the Finns have a not wholly undeserved reputation as a silent, humorless and melancholy people. Their outlook on life is often summed up in the word “sisu,” which denotes a grim determination to do what must be done, regardless of circumstances — the kind of gritty perseverance that helped Finland survive for decades beneath the dark cloud of the Soviet Union. The Finns’ psychic isolation is especially marked during the long, gloomy winters, when tens of thousands of them seek solace in a peculiarly Finnish kind of tango — not “the groin-grinding, passionate Latin American version,” as Morley Safer once wrote, “but a sad shuffle in a minor key.”

The sun burns all that away. Helsinki may be the world’s second most northerly capital city, after Reykjavik, and it may be lapped by the Baltic, but it can feel almost Mediterranean on a fine August day, with soft, golden light bathing the pastel-colored Italianate buildings around Senate Square, a legacy from Russian rule in the 19th century, and ferries, cruise ships and trawlers filling in a lively marine backdrop.

History may be changing the national character as well. My old friend Max Jacobson, one of Europe’s most distinguished diplomats, thinks so. For many years, he told me, Finns themselves and the rest of the world tended to define their country in relation to the Soviets. But now, he said, “we have stepped out of the shadow of the Russian bear and into a more cosmopolitan role as mainstream Europeans.”

Not that the rest of Europe has entirely caught on. For some unfathomable reason, the leaders of larger countries have taken to demeaning Finnish food; Jacques Chirac said it was the worst in Europe except for England’s, and Silvio Berlusconi sneered that the Finns didn’t know what prosciutto was.

What are those guys smoking? Maybe they don’t like Finnish coffee. The Finns drink more java per capita than anyone else in the world (almost 25 pounds of beans every year), but it’s not espresso and it’s not really very good. Too bad; the cafes, like bustling Café Strindberg, on the Esplanade, Café Fazer, known for ice cream, and Café Ekberg, founded in 1852 (Café Greco, Rome, 1760), are quite delightful.

But I doubt that you’ll take the politicians’ animadversions very seriously after a visit to the Kauppatori, or Market Square, which lies at the foot of the Esplanade, where it meets the harbor. Stallholders sell a dizzying array of luscious berries — bilberries, lingonberries, amber-colored cloudberries — which in Finland as in Sweden and Scotland and other northern climes ripen slowly to an extraordinary sweetness. And fishermen sell fresh and smoked fish straight from their boats, as well as delicate roe from vendace (a kind of whitefish), trout, herring and salmon.

Next step across to the Kauppahalli, the red-and-yellow-brick covered market built in 1888 and packed with artistically displayed things to eat, including cheeses from France and olives from Italy — listen up, Mr. Chirac and Mr. Berlusconi — lemon sole, plaice, char and other prized fish, silky gravlax, bear salami and reindeer kebabs. Plus discs of the ubiquitous and much-loved crispbread and irresistible big loaves of rye. I was specially impressed by the Tuula Paalanen cheese shop, the Hongisto bakery and the immaculate fish at E. Eriksson.

Fish is the thing in the Finnish diet, and few cook it better than Hans Valimaki, who serves brandade of cod with balsam syrup and lobster poached in vanilla-scented beurre monté at Chez Dominique, to say nothing of his pigeon stuffed with foie gras and garnished with flavor-packed parsley purée. Of the last, my notes say, “this is the sort of dish you go to great restaurants for.” Pared-down, gray-walled, tiny (10 tables) and shatteringly expensive, Chez Dominique lies just a block off the Esplanade.

The Michelin guide gives it two stars, but Michelin looks fondly on all things French, and I find some other Helsinki tables nearly as good, including G. W. Sundmans, housed in a magnificent old ship captain’s house, which serves improbably delicious tar-flavored ice cream; the unobtrusive George, which features a delectable scallop and artichoke tartlet with hollandaise sauce; and the clubby Mecca, where Mr. Valimaki himself offers whimsies like shrimp dumplings with a lime and pineapple dip and gamy tapenade-spiced red mullet with salami risotto and watermelon dressing.

If you like that sort of thing. If you don’t, you might be happier at Bellevue, a stronghold of traditional Russian cooking and soulful Russian music. This is the place to get your herring fix (pickled, in mustard, in sour cream) and to sample spectacularly tart Russian pickles with sour cream and honey, heartbreakingly authentic borscht, and properly made chicken Kiev, bursting with hazelnut-flavored butter, served with fresh spring peas. The fringe benefits are generous: sunflowers in a big vase, warm-hearted service, slabs of black, fabulously rich bread studded with currants, and ample tots of Russky Standard Platinum, one of the very finest vodkas on the planet.

The Savoy, founded in 1937 and designed by Aalto, is Helsinki’s much lower-key counterpart to Manhattan’s Four Seasons, founded in 1959 and designed by Mies and Philip Johnson — playpen of the powerful, defender of the local culinary faith, temple of classic form. Perched on the eighth floor of an office building, amid the Esplanade treetops, it is furnished with chairs, light fixtures and even coat racks by the master and filled with his trademark free-form vases, whose shape is echoed in a serving table.

This was the favorite restaurant of Finland’s national hero, Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim, and his favorite dish, vorschmack, a mixture of ground beef, mutton and minced herring, is always on the menu. Too folkloric for me, I’m afraid, and I confess that I wasn’t thrilled to see an “orange tart with Sri Lankan cinnamon foam” on the menu recently. Catalonia has a lot to answer for. But there are always lots of things Betsey and I love to eat in this ever-fresh setting, with bright blue and white pansies in its window boxes: white asparagus in season, partridge mousse, grilled herrings with dill butter, pikeperch with horseradish butter and salmon with creamed morels (game and wild mushrooms from the all but limitless forests are Finnish passions, and on June 20, the first day of wild duck season, you’ll find the duck on many restaurants’ menus).

In late July and August, many of the movers and shakers who eat lunch at the Savoy eat dinner at crayfish parties, often at the NJK Yacht Club on Blekholmen Island. Through the intervention of Jukka Valtasaari, then Finland’s ambassador to Washington, we did likewise one balmy night a couple of years ago, dispatching great heaps of the little red critters, which had been boiled for just 10 or 12 minutes with salt, a couple of lumps of sugar and dill — potently flavored crown dill, harvested after flowering, not the more familiar feathery type — then allowed to cool for hours, so they could absorb all of the flavor in the cooking liquid.

Naturally, such parties have an established ritual, which includes bibs, special knives, paper lanterns and lots of slurping sounds, made by greedy diners as they suck the juices from the crayfish before shelling them. The meat goes onto buttered toast with more dill and perhaps a touch of lemon juice, either piled on at random or arranged in perfect alignment by fastidious spirits like Etel, the ambassador’s wife.

As I recall, large quantities of schnapps — vodka and aquavit — were consumed before the revels ended, but nothing like the proverbial “one drink for every claw.” The only time I tried that, I failed to stay the course. I had lots of company.

It all seems far removed from the mainstream Western experience, but that can be misleading. Turning back to the world of architecture and design, consider Eliel Saarinen’s Helsinki train station (1919), with its four forbidding stone guardians, strange and giant figures bearing illuminated globes, straight from Nordic myth.

It led to Saarinen’s entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition in 1922, in which he finished second, and that in turn led to his appointment to head the Cranbrook Academy of Art, near Detroit. There he trained a whole generation of quintessentially American designers, including Florence Schust Knoll, Harry Bertoia, Ray and Charles Eames and his own illustrious son, Eero, the creator of such soaring, optimistic structures as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and Dulles airport near Washington.

Or consider the silver-skinned Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki’s current favorite, so Finnish in its spirit, glowing at night like a sheet of ice or a piece of glass by Sarpaneva or Wirkkala, yet designed by Steven Holl of New York, previously best known, perhaps, for the jewel-like Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle.

Aalto’s Finlandia Hall, completed in 1971, may be his masterwork — it is certainly one of the few contemporary concert chambers where the acoustics have worked perfectly from the start — and his cube-shaped, glacier-white Enzo-Gutzeit building (1962) forms an invaluable part of the vista across the harbor. His house can be visited. But the defining quality of the man, his sheer humanity, may best be appreciated at the Academic Bookstore, one of the biggest in Europe, with more than 500,000 titles in stock in a half-dozen languages.

The bookstore is tucked into a relatively anonymous office building, yet the observant will notice at once the elegantly sculptural and superbly ergonomic bronze door handles — three on each door, for people of varying heights. Inside, the three-story space, with two balconies, is illuminated by three gigantic prismatic skylights embedded in the ceiling; neither banal nor grandiose, it is a perfect environment, scaled to human proportions, in which to browse.

But then, Helsinki is a feast for the architecture and design buff, with its neo-Classical and Art Nouveau buildings setting the stage for its modern gems. Museums mount exhibitions of the work of favorite sons and daughters, like the fabric designer Maija Isola (1927-2001), who created the colorful Poppy textiles for Marimekko, printed with bold, oversized flowers, beloved in the 1960’s and now back in vogue. The Esplanade, of course, is lined with the seductive boutiques of Marimekko (four of them), Iittala, Arabia and Artek, where you can admire not only Aalto’s familiar bentwood three-legged stools but much more.

The truly keen will be rewarded by exploring the streets north of Senate Square, where dealers like Kaunus Arki and Vanhaa ja Kaunista sell objects from the golden age of Finnish design.

So much for the past. The present is on offer not only along the Esplanade, where designs by the Italian Renzo Piano and the young Finn Stefan Lindfors catch the eye, but also in the design district, with museums, shops and restaurants. At its center is Design Forum Finland, a showcase for the products of newer firms and younger talents, like Tonfisk and Saara Renvall. Clustered nearby are shops like Ivana Helsinki and Limbo and Lux, selling hip, youthful fashion, and many others, like Secco, which deals in products made from recycled tires and other items, plus AERO Design and Ameba Design, specialists in classic furniture.

And both Chez Dominique and Mecca are right around the corner.

VISITOR INFORMATION

WHERE TO STAY

Hotel Kamp, Pohjoisesplanadi 29, (358-9) 576-111, www.hotelkamp.fi/en. This is Helsinki’s Crillon or Connaught, built in 1887 and brought lovingly back to life in 1999. Ideally located in the very heart of the city, skillfully managed and opulent in every detail, from its saunas (including a few in luxury suites) to its shopping gallery to its four restaurants. The obvious first choice, if you can afford it. From 280 euros (about $370 at $1.31 to the euro).

Klaus K Hotel, Bulevardi 2, (358-20) 770-4700, www.klauskhotel.com. Finland’s first design hotel is in the new design district, with 137 snug contemporary rooms in shades of white, brown and gold, equipped with the latest electronic toys. Several good restaurants, including Toscanini (Italian) and Ilmatar, where the Ethiopian-born Swedish chef Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit in New York consults. From 115 euros.

WHERE TO EAT

Chez Dominique, which is relocating to Rikhardinkatu 4; (358-9) 612-7393; www.chezdominique.fi.

Mecca, Korkeavuorenkatu 34; (358-9) 1345-6200; www.mecca.fi. Dinner for two with wine, 175 euros.

Bellevue, Rahapajankatu 3; (358-9) 179-560; www.restaurantbellevue.com. Dinner for two with wine, 130 euros.

Savoy, Etelaesplanadi 14; (358-9) 684-4020; www.royalravintolat.com/savoy/index_eng.asp. Dinner for two with wine, 250 euros.

G. W. Sundmans, Etelaranta 16; (358-9) 622-6410; www.royalravintolat.com/sundmans/index_eng.asp. Dinner for two with wine, 250 euros.

George, Kalevankatu 17; (358-9) 647-662; www.george.fi. Dinner for two with wine, 150 euros.

R. W. APPLE Jr. is associate editor of The New York Times.



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