Surprise, surprise

Café Strindberg
Pohjoisesplanadi 33,
Helsinki 00100, Finland
Tel: +358 9681 2030

I must admit that it has been a long while since I have been surprised by a restaurant. These days, I rarely go out to eat without a thorough consideration of the options available to me, accompanied by extensive consultations and online research on the worthy candidates. I can’t remember the last time I just popped into a restaurant, in the hopes that it would be good. On the one hand, life is too short for mediocre meals, so any advance preparation and an element of discrimination must be worth it – right? On the other, this also means that by the time I actually set foot in a restaurant, I would have at least some inkling of what the restaurant was all about – who the chef was, what kind of food it served, what it was known for. For better or for worse, this takes the magic of unexpected surprises out of the dining experience.

I was in Finland recently for work, and our meeting counterparts had suggested a place close by their offices for a working lunch. In my mind I had written this meal off – expecting a simple sandwich place and a quick, hurried meal interrupted by the taking of notes and the back-and-forth of negotiations and explanations. As such, I didn’t bother researching the restaurant, and when I got there I had close to zero expectations of the place. It turns out that I had severely underestimated the Finnish.

Café Strindberg is part of the Kamp Galleria, an upscale shopping complex in the heart of Helsinki. It is on a corner right off the Esplanad – one of Helsinki’s major pedestrian and traffic thoroughfares – and at first sight looked extremely promising. The ground floor is a café in the truest sense – with a deli and pastry counter, tables and chairs scattered in a cosy manner, and Finnish rugs adorning the walls providing the kind of atmosphere that is perfect for sipping hot chocolate. The second floor consists of a bar area, with both hightop counter tables and laid-back couches; and the restaurant, an elegantly designed eating area overlooking the Esplanad. The windows are huge and spotless – this is a trend very prevalent to the buildings in Helsinki; I found out later that because daylight hours are so short in the winter and the fall, the Finns like to make the most of natural daylight when they can. For lunch, this makes for very pleasant dining – for some reason sunlight and white tablecloths relax me in a way that few other combinations can.

The place is clearly a tourist attraction – we heard a smattering of foreign languages at the tables around us, and the dead giveaway was that they had the menu in English in addition to the Finnish. Yet for a tourist attraction it seems to strike an easy balance between the cosmopolitan (it would not feel out of place on the Upper East Side) and the local (Finnish delicacies like herring and salmon soup are just some of the specialties here). Our waitress spoke in fluent and distinctly American accented English, and did her level best to make us feel at ease in a foreign land.

The bread is one of the main draws here – for in addition to being well-baked it comes with a stellar spread of hummus, something completely unexpected. Who knew that you could find good hummus in Helsinki? I threw decorum to the wind and focused on demolishing the contents of the bread basket; I was probably never going to see these people again and so gave myself license to pig out.

I had a Caesar salad to start – admittedly a boring choice, but for all its good food it is terribly difficult to find decent treatments of vegetables in Helsinki, and I was in need of some. I asked for a topping of crayfish, which was surprisingly fresh. Some of my colleagues took the more adventurous routes of liver in lingonberry sauce, and escargot – both of which received a thumbs-up, but which I did not get to try.

Our hosts proclaimed Helsinki as being renowned for fresh seafood, and I went with the Artic char on a bed of lentils. I particularly liked the lentils, simply done and to the right consistency, and something I had not eaten in a long while; but the fish itself was a minor disappointment. It was cooked well, but the skin still bore heavy traces of the salt that had been used to dry it out, which made eating it almost impossible. The king prawn risotto that one of my colleagues ordered looked promising, but I saw her reach for the salt and pepper not once, not twice but three times. There is no worse crime, I think, than under-seasoning food. But in sum the reports from around the table were generally positive, with the whitefish being a standout dish.

I don’t think I would have enjoyed myself as thoroughly as I did if I had gone to Café Strindberg with any advance knowledge of it. It may not have been a standout restaurant, but the quality was enough to surprise me, and the atmosphere was top notch. It felt like a great place for a leisurely lunch, and the people-watching both in the restaurant as well as on the esplanade outdoors was first-rate. The restaurant was a tad expensive, but perhaps the downstairs café would have been easier on the wallet and a better alternative for frequent repeat visits.

On the plane leaving Finland (for London, DC and New York – where I will continue to eat my way through old favourites and restaurants that I know so much about), I couldn’t help but rethink my approach to eating out. Perhaps once in a while it may be a good idea to just throw caution to the wind and gamble on the restaurant in the corner that looks inviting despite the limited human traffic and lack of word-of-mouth publicity. I may rethink that strategy the next time I just jump into a place and have a terrible meal, but the potential for romance, I think, is just too enticing.