Tallinn's café culture, and where to sit for three hours

A country with a long dark winter builds good cafés, and Tallinn's are among the most comfortable in northern Europe.

The specialty scene is concentrated in Telliskivi and Kalamaja, where the roasters are. The Brick Coffee Roastery has supplied much of the city for years and now runs its own café; the surrounding streets hold half a dozen more rooms doing single-origin filter properly. This is where to go if the coffee is the point.

The Old Town has the historic version — high ceilings, marble, cake counters, and a pace that has not changed in decades. These are for sitting in rather than for working, and the cake is genuinely part of the offer rather than an afterthought.

On working: Tallinn is one of the easiest cities anywhere to work from a café. Wifi is universal and fast, nobody moves you along, sockets are common, and the digital-nomad and startup crowd here means a laptop on a table is unremarkable. Telliskivi is effectively an open-plan office with better coffee.

A specific local pleasure: many cafés here run a lunch offer — a soup or a plate of the day at a fixed low price, served between twelve and three. It is how office Tallinn eats, it is usually good, and it is rarely advertised in English.

And everything takes card. This is the most cashless country in Europe and it is not close.