Love the atmosphere here & it’s great for a night out when you want to actually talk (and have good food.) I liked the menu (local foods like mushrooms, berries and fish included) though some might not.

The food and service are atrocious, especially considering the price point. Our waitress kept dripping wine when serving our table and one of the chefs spilled sauce for the main course all over my suit. The staff was barely apologetic for this and did not even bring us soda water for cleaning the stains, and we ended up leaving before dessert to avoid any further damage. The vegetarian dishes used extremely weird combinations, and the aubergine was so bitter it was borderline uneatable. Both my wife and I also had a slightly upset stomach after the dinner. There are so many good bistros at the same price point in Helsinki so you should avoid this one like a plague.

The food, although pretty to look at, was a a total failure in flavor and execution. I don’t think I have ever commented on a food experience this negatively, but this time it was impossible not to. I am not doing it as a way to be rude, but I think the place has good potential but desperately needs some constructive feedback.

We took the 4 course menu, one of which was the vegetarian option.

The first course was a small tart with root vegetables and some type of mushroom I think. In itself it wasn’t terrible, but like everything else, too much salt and the vegetarian option was straight out of the freezer. So cold that it was like biting into a popsicle.

The second course was probably the worst, it was a small bowl with oddly hard cured fish and what tastes like salt water with a bit of mayonnaise mixed in. The vegetarian was the exact same thing except instead of fish there was what basically tasted like canned button mushrooms. Again the salt was through the roof.

The vegetarian main course was, surprisingly a plate of salted mushrooms with over salted beetroot and a mushroom puree or something like it. The other dish was the same except it had a small piece of tough meat and a sauce that was so overpoweringly salted that I had to leave it uneaten.

The dessert was an ice-cream with a slightly burnt caramel sauce, super sour berries that did not work with the sweetness, and some odd flower thing that didn’t work with the overall flavor profile. But hey, at least it wasn’t overly salted.

This was a sad example of the “salt blindness” that I used to see often in Finland. I am not sure where it comes from. But unlike similar restaurants in cities I worked and lived in like London and Paris, here, food used to be destroyed with so much salt that that your mouth hurts. I am not sure if it was because we needed to store things in salt, and we got used to it. And I get it, if you want to have a seasonal restaurant I guess you need preserved vegetables etc. But times have changes, and cooking with these things really requires a lot of thought.

The restaurant had apparently just changed menu. So maybe this was somehow related. But I can’t I imagine what the dishes that didn’t make the list were like. The current menu felt like it was generated by an AI program, putting together things that look good on paper, without any concept of how they taste.

I know it sounds mean, but it wasn’t just the concept dishes that were not thought through. It was also the really basic things that didn’t work. Salt, acid, fat, texture, flavorings, nothing very was balanced.
The staff did listen to the feedback, even though I am sure I sounded like a privileged you know what, and did their best to make it up to us.

I didn’t talk about the wine per glass selection. Let’s just say I was bewildered and leave it at that.
But hey, the bread and butter was good.

Very nice atmosphere. Tiny restaurant in a great place in Katajanokka. Great friendly service given by a young lady. Food was excellent and so beautifull. A little bit too noisy place to discus with a bigger group of people. But still I recommend this place.

This is a fabulous restaurant - food and service is top quality and has great relaxed and cosy ambience. We had 6 course tasting menu with wines and every course was superb