Helsinki part 3: What we ate and drank

This is part 3 or my Helsinki write up and its about food and drink. With a few exceptions we mainly just hunted around on google maps for places nearby wherever we happened to be, so this is a bit of a random selection. We didn't go for any Finnish specialities, but you can get salmon soup, and lots of reindeer meat stuff in all the market halls, which have halls food stalls and lots of little restaurants inside them. There were three old market we visited (there may be more). There's one in the central harbour that is the most aimed at visitors - this one also has lots of tents with more stalls and cafes outside it - one in Kallio and one in Kamppi on the west side of the city.

Usually when we travel to cities we go round looking for speciality coffee places which there were surprisingly few in Helsinki. I think the reason is that the coffee is really good everywhere. Finland has the biggest per head coffee consumption in Europe, and you can tell. When we were buying teabags in the supermarket there was one option and one option only, but two whole shelves full of coffee. Everywhere has filter coffee in big vats they just give you a cup and you help yourself and it's really cheap. I couldn't work out if the cup also entitled you to refills but I wouldn't be surprised. We went to a tiny takeaway type sushi restaurant with three tables and even they had the coffee and it was free. And somehow good quality, not that overstewed stuff you get at conferences. 

There were two coffee places work mentioning. The first is Helsinki Coffee Roaster (on google maps by its Finnish name Helsingin Kahvipaahtimo) in Vallila was the one speciality coffee place we went to, and the reason we even went to Vallila. More of a shop really, with just one table inside and two outside, but a fun random vintage things interior.

The other notable coffee place we went to was Cafetoria near the rock church, which specialises in Latin American coffee and also sells delicious empanadas. 

Back to food, here is the places we ate I can remember the names of:

Green Hippo in Kallio. This is not quite vegetarian but very heavy on the fresh raw/minimally cooked vegetables. I had a bowl with all the things and the others had a chicken broccoli and black rice salad thing (main picture for this post)

Levain is a very instagrammy bakery/ brunch place. There are three branches, we went to the one near the Kamppi flea market which I think is the original.

Olivia in Central station, a pizza restaurant with a really lovely interior in a big arch

Fuji Biyori, a small Japanese restaurant and sake bar with counter seating and really nice interiors. The  menu was small and fancier/more expensive than we expected, but we had the ramen which wasn't and was lovely. 

Everest Katanjanokka, a Nepalese restaurant on the Katanjanokka island (?) to the east of the main harbour, in a street with some really cool art deco houses. The guy was super chatty and the food was delicious. The boys had butter chicken and I think this might actually be the nicest sauce of that I've tasted. One funny thing was that he warned Dave twice that the biryani was spicy but it wasn't at all.

We had food on both of the islands we visited, the pizza place on Suomenlinna was meh, but the cafe on Seurasaari was great. I had a baked potato with salmon which was a proper sauce with dill, not your usual baked potato filling. As close to actual Finnish food as I got on this trip, strangely.

We also had sushi in Vallila in a place I can't remember the name of and burgers from the chain Friends & Brgrs which has an excellent sounding varied menu that was just fine, it didn't quite deliver on how good it sounded