What Estonian food actually is, and where to eat it

Estonian food is a northern cuisine built on preservation — smoking, curing, pickling and fermenting — and the modern version has turned those constraints into a style.

The traditional anchors are worth knowing. Black rye bread, dense and slightly sour, served with everything and genuinely good. Smoked fish, particularly Baltic herring and eel. Forest mushrooms and berries in season, which in this country means people actually go and pick them. Sour cream on more things than you would expect. Blood sausage at Christmas, which is exactly as divisive as it sounds.

The contemporary scene is where it gets interesting. Tallinn's New Nordic kitchens take those same ingredients — the fish, the rye, the foraged material — and treat them with the technique the rest of the region has been applying for two decades. The result is one of the more underrated fine dining cities in Europe, at prices that would be a third higher in Copenhagen or Stockholm.

For the traditional version, the Old Town restaurants that lean medieval are theatre rather than cooking. The honest traditional food is in the market halls and the neighbourhood restaurants in Kalamaja.

The seasonal advice is real here: this is a country with a short growing season and a long dark winter, and the menus change accordingly. Late summer and early autumn — mushrooms, berries, new potatoes — is the best eating of the year by a distance.