Restaurant Day adds more spice to Finnish food culture

On a Helsinki street corner, a Finnish family savours Indian deep-fried lentil patties with yoghurt and chutney, devouring the rich, exotic morsels for much-needed warmth in the November chill.

Jaakko Latikka, Krista Kujala and their two young sons are grabbing a bite to eat on Restaurant Day, when ordinary people open “pop-up” eateries for a day and serve food out of their own kitchens or on street corners.

The family enjoys an Indian dish called Dahi Bhalla, cooked by Mumbai expats Nikhil Salian and Krupesh Kothari and served on plastic plates from a knee-high table on the street.

The boys, Antti and Lauri, complain of the cold, but at the first taste of the patties they forget the subzero temperatures.

“Restaurant Day started in Finland earlier this year, a one-day carnival in favour of free-spirited restaurant and food culture”, according to the Facebook page created by its organisers.

“We had over 300 restaurants in 40 cities across Finland, and one in Germany,” said co-organiser Kirsti Tuominen, describing the latest event as a huge success.

With a variety of menus to choose from, Restaurant Day encourages normally cuisine-conservative Finns, traditionally accustomed to heavy, bland peasant-style dishes, to be more adventurous.

Opening their homes and kitchens to strangers has also struck a popular chord with many Finns, known as generally reserved and taciturn.

The creativity shown on Restaurant Day serves as a strong counter to the much-maligned comments of Italian ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, who in 2005 quipped that Finland should be ineligible to host the EU’s food authority because its citizens knew nothing about cuisine. Salian and Kothari have been in Finland for five months of a one-year contract with an Indian IT consulting services company, and could not resist the opportunity to share their food culture and reach out to the Finnish community.

Surrounded by flowers in vivid hues, passersby catch a whiff of cinnamon wafting from spicy pancakes covered in chocolate and lemon sauce – an eclectic yet tasty combination. Simola’s diverse menu also combines Finnish staples like meatballs and lingonberry jelly, Italian sandwiches, French-style Napoleon cake and Turkish yoghurt. On the other side of the city, the makeshift Angry Birds Cafe is based in the small, charming apartment of chef-for-a-day Mia Aspegren and her son Topi Ylitalo.

Parents stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the small space, eating and chatting, while their children play the popular Angry Birds game on their mobile phones in a bedroom.