The Joys of Eating in Finland

Before my recent trip to Helsinki and Turku, I honestly was not expecting to be wowed by Finnish cuisine.  I quickly learned that Finland, a country of just 5.6 million residents, punches above its weight when it comes to cooking. Helsinki alone has over 100 restaurants, bars, and bakeries in its compact, 2.5 square mile center.  I was completely wowed. 

There’ s a surge of creativity and talent in Helsinki and Turku’s restaurants that makes the region an incredible place to dine. Together, they collected a total of 10 Michelin stars in 2025, but I was more impressed by the breadth and depth of seasonal, traditional, locally-foraged, and sustainable influences on our dining experiences.

Seasonal sweetness

In a Nordic country with a short summer, seasonal eating becomes extra important. The growing season is short, but the summer days are long, and the concentrated quality sunshine, the temperature difference between day and night, and the plentiful water for irrigation offer huge boosts to plant growth and produce quality.

Finnish strawberries and raspberries ripen sweetly and deeply, as do potatoes, other root vegetables, and cooking and salad greens. In September, during our visit, the indoor and outdoor markets overflowed with tart lingonberries, fresh water fish (including a large amount of smoked fish) from nearby lakes and streams , mushrooms, and leafy greens.

Traditions start with the good stuff

The traditional dishes that I encountered during my visit were very much inspired by Finland’s native ingredients.  I still can’t swallow salmiakki, the beloved, ammonium chloride-laced salty black licorice, but I found plenty of delicious dishes that I still crave. 

I was lucky to be in Finland during crayfish season, which kicks off with parties in late July and August known as rapujuhlat, with plenty of chilled crayfish, toast, and schnapps. In September, the festivities had ended but the freshwater crayfish were still in season, and I heartily enjoyed the traditional crayfish salad for lunch, with a spectrum of crunchy vegetables, eggs, rich mayonnaise, and cold crayfish on top. (Days later, at Smör, an elegant modern Nordic restaurant by the Aura river in Turku, we dined on local crayfish as our first course (of many).)

Our hotel breakfast buffets were loaded with whole-grain breads and local cheeses in a variety of shapes and sizes–I quickly learned to smear egg butter (crushed boiled eggs with soft salted butter) on rye toast like a native. But no bread celebrates the native grains of Finland more than archipelago bread, or saaristolaisleipä, a dense chewy brick of malted rye found in bakeries all over Finland.

At the long-standing Herkkunuotta in Turku’s Market Hall, we happily ate another crayfish salad, tried a light-handed rendition of reindeer stew, served with mashed potatoes and crushed sweetened lingonberries, and a really wonderful salmon soup, known as lohikeitto, finished with cream and fresh dill.

Foraged equals fresh

In Finland, it seems everyone you meet is a forager. Buoyed by Jokaisenoikeudet, the “freedom to roam” known as Everyone’s Rights, the people of Finland may move around in nature and make use of natural resources, even in city parks and on private land. You can ski, swim, fish with a line and a rod, and forage berries, herbs, and wild mushrooms for your own consumption. In September in Helsinki, we regularly saw locals on the public tram toting baskets of wild mushrooms, the spoils of an afternoon exploring the woods of nearby city parks. 

Finnish chefs are quite comfortable using foraged ingredients, often picked by their own employees.  At Kakolanruusu, the fantastic restaurant inside of Kakola, a former Turku prison turned into a jail-themed hotel, the cooks pick their own flowers and herbs to season and decorate the plates. We heartily enjoyed our family style “Big Feast,” (especially the beef tartare with fresh golden currants and sage  and the grilled fish with vin jaune). At Helsinki’s new Ravintola Jason, Chef Jari Vesivalo, formerly of Olo, served us no less than three types of local mushrooms in his magnificent six-course show. 

The extra benefits of foraging include being outside and mindful and joining your community in sourcing local ingredients. Sami Tallberg, who took us on a fascinating mushroom forage in the Turku archipelago, calls this phenonmenon a “foraging mentality.” As Chef Mark Hix says in the foreword of his protegé Tallberg’s The Forager’s Cookbook, “With constantly rising food prices we should be turning to the wild for free food that’s much healthier and has fascinating flavours compared to cultivated food that gets flown around the world.” 

And there’s potential for growth. Restaurant Nolla’s Chef Albert Sunyer Franch told us that there’s quite a bit of food going to waste in Finnish forests. Folks just don’t access all of the berries, mushrooms, and nettles that naturally appear. 

The night we visited Restaurant Nolla we dined at the chef’s table, more accurately a wooden table just steps from the cooking line. From there we witnessed a forager delivering a box of yellow foot mushrooms at the end of the night. “There’s a real sense of community,” says Franch,  “when someone knocks on your back door with a tub of blueberries.”

Finnish distillers and mixologists participate in the local and seasonal game as well. We enjoyed outstanding contemporary cocktails from Timo Siitonen at Kupoli Cocktail Bar, spiked with foraged ingredients like pickled chanterelles, spruce tips, and rowanberries. The Helsinki Distilling Company makes local akvavit from Finnish grains and caraway,  whiskeys from local rye and malted barley, and many other beverages, and their tasting room in hip Teurastamo is worth a visit. 

Sustainable can also mean delicious

Nolla, which literally means “zero,” is a no-waste restaurant, and relies heavily on local produce from farms like Irantila, in Kirkkonummi, about 45 minutes outside of Helsinki. When we visited for brunch in the field, farmer Ira Wichmann explained the cycle of sustainability between her farm and her restaurant partners. “There’s a lot of waste in farming,” she said, “and there’s a lot of plant parts that consumers don’t want to eat. Things like fennel roots, or Jerusalem artichoke leaves or the stems of salad greens. You don’t want to sell it to a consumer because they won’t know what to do with it.

The guys at Nolla will pickle it, they will ferment it, and they will transform it into something. So when I thin out my carrots, the carrot thinnings go to the table at Nolla.” In turn, Nolla shares their composted food waste to nourish her produce, “which goes back to Nolla’s tables, so there’s the circularity.” One incredible thing we noticed from our chef table vantage point–there are no trash cans in Nolla’s kitchen. 

*Many thanks to VisitFinland, Helsinki Partners, and Visit Turku Archipelago for hosting our gastronomic discovery of the region. I highly recommend booking a foraging trip for the complete Finnish experience.