This video tells you a short story of a Sunday morning at the Café Esplanad in Helsinki. It is a place where tens of thousands of foreign tourists must have certainly had time to visit and enjoy their cafes on the terrace before me. This, even though I had lived in Helsinki for more than 20 years.
The elderly and famous Café Esplanad gathered customers in a queue even on a Sunday morning, when the streets of Helsinki were otherwise looking empty as well as the café terrace.
The café’s bakery selection included stuffed sandwiches and delicious-looking pastries, cakes, pies and plush croissants. The meringues were looking like straight from a storybook. In addition to meringue, a sweet chocolate-coated dry cake was found as a gluten-free alternative. And even though I had not been a fan of dry cakes, the tasty dry cake shown in the video made me want to learn how to bake a dry cake myself.
The café’s comprehensive tea selection and the lactose-free and gluten-free products clearly labeled will surely make me visit this café again.
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My latest video in YouTube tells about the South Indian chain restaurant Saravanaa Bhavan in Stockholm in 2019 and 2021, before and after Corona. I do not mean the time after Corona, as Covid19 is still strongly present in our daily lives, but the time when the corona restrictions allowed us to travel again.
Indeed, I was able to travel to Stockholm last weekend after a long time and to my great surprise Covid19 was not visible in the city streets and restaurants in Stockholm. No one in Stockholm wore a mask or paid attention to safety gaps, except two Chinese tourists. Even the tables in this video-featured restaurant were all full at lunchtime and no one had masks, not even the waiters. Handsanitizers were also not visible anywhere, so it was good that I had carried mine along.
I wonder if Corona had taxed Stockholm’s restaurants during the past couple of years, or what might have been the reason that the “best South Indian restaurant in Stockholm” I wrote about in 2019 was in 2021 a mere memory in terms of tasty food. The setting of the restaurant was okay and almost as before, but the food and the veg thali were more like a decoration, some even completely over-salty. There was nothing like the unchanging good quality of Saravana Bhavan’s chain restaurant. In addition to this, my companion, who ordered vegan thali, was exhausted from bread which could not be delivered during the whole meal, for whatever reason. And surprisingly the waiters also had lunch downstairs among other restaurant customers before they started serving them, wearing regular jeans and a t-shirt only, just like any other customer. The authentic Indian waitress of 2019 was now just a memory.
But since I had travelled to Stockholm after a long time and specifically went to this restaurant, a video of that trip had to be made, no matter what the taste. Now you can watch the video here –
And although this time the food was disappointing, I still call for Saravana Bhavan to have a restaurant in Helsinki, Finland, also, as I have done for more than one decade. I cannot believe that the quality of all the Saravanaa Bhavan restaurants in the world would have deteriorated substantially.
Corona measures in the Port of Helsinki
When I arrived in Finland after roaming around in Stockholm, tourists were put in order in the Olympic Terminal at the Port of Helsinki. Vaccinated, unvaccinated and cruise passengers who had not visited Sweden were separated into different queues in the port. With the mask and instructions given in hand I was able to continue my journey out of the port to Helsinki, feeling grateful for the caretaking of society and that I had been able to travel again, after being vaccinated.
