If you take highway 127 north all the way to the very end, just before your car goes off the dock in and into the sea, you’ll find Kalakohvik Dirhami, the Dirhami Fish Café. It’s a café that serves almost exclusively fish (that is, fish is on the menu; it’s not a place where fish are the clientele) although strict vegetarians will always find something, and the dessert and drink menus are mercifully free of fish products. It’s only open in the summer, and while there are a few tables, the main attraction – besides the food – is the spacious terrace, which affords views of the meadows, the harbor, and the sea. It is ideal for watching a romantic sunset, provided the weather is clement.

OKO is a beachfront restaurant outside Tallinn proper – even further out than NOA (q.v.), its sister establishment, and likewise blessed with a fine of the sea as well as Tallinn across the bay. It is probably even better at night or during sunset, but as we were there for lunch all we got to enjoy were the sea, the sand, the sun, the raucous cackling of the gulls, and the wind. The wind! It was intense and seemingly localized to OKO’s front porch, which leads me to suggest that the design of the building and its surroundings is creating a wind sheer effect that makes an otherwise mild wind much worse. However, this blog is about food and not architecture (Edificing Estonia? Must look into it) so on with the eating!

Dinner at Uulits has become something of a tradition for me the night of my arrival in Tallinn. One disadvantage of this practice, however, is that one eventually runs out of new things to try on the menu. Imagine, then, my joy at seeing that sometime in the preceding months, Uulits had refreshed their menu and added several new delicious items to go along with the old delicious ones.

Lahemaa Kohvikann is a small roadside eatery near the Lahemaa Rahvapark, a national park in Lääne-Viru county in northern Estonia, famous for its raised bogs. The national park, that is, not the restaurant – the restaurant is famous for its fish and German cuisine, and offers an outdoor terrace as long as the weather cooperates.

Another day, another trip to Tallinn, another opportunity to indulge the pleasures of the flesh. To wit: Burgers at Uulits. I made two mistakes today before getting there, eating too much for lunch and not drinking enough water on the plain, so I was too full for fries and too dehydrated to drink anything but water. However, all that means for you, O Reader, is that my gustatory attention was devoted to the burger and nothing else.

There’s a certain physical aesthetic associated with Indian restaurants wherever you go. There are the obvious things, the paintings of the Taj Mahal and the photos of Bollywood stars, the statues of Buddha and Ganesha and symbols of Krishna and so on, but also a predilection for dark wooden furniture, upcast light, subtle and ornate designs, and generally a quiet and reserved atmosphere – and this holds broadly true also in India itself, although adornment pertaining to religion  tends to be reduced and confined to one or another.

Continue reading “Lendav Taldrik” →

The mysterious door to nowhere has not yet been solved, so of course we have to come back to F-Hoone to plumb them further. Well, most of the attention was focused on plumbing the menu, but I’m sure mystery was on the agenda somewhere.

Continue reading “F-Hoone (2)” →

On a quiet, unassuming street in the quiet, unassuming district of Pelgulinn, there’s a long, squat building out from which juts a small, wooden hanging sign declaring: KAJA. That is your invitation to Kaja Pizza Köök, which would otherwise resemble from the outside a speakeasy or secret society lodge.

Continue reading “Kaja Pizza Köök” →

Uulits Tänavagurmee (which, as far as I can tell in my limited Estonian, means Street Street-Gourmet) is a burger joint with several locations in Tallinn. Or rather: the burger joint. True to its pleonasmic namesake, Uulits is pretty casual even by Estonian standards, with swings for seats at the Kalamaja restaurant, for when you feel the need to recreate that awkward-teenager-on-a-date-so-let’s-chill-out-in-an-empty-playground feeling from your youth (or present). As well as regular seats, for those of us who’d rather not.

Continue reading “Uulits” →