These two chefs from the northern islands of Estonia rock!

The place’s packed. Only locals. It’s very noisy but in a few minutes you join in.

The menu is based on fresh local products from the North of the country. Rhubarb, cauliflower, various root crops, Baltic fish and seafood, moose meat, mutton, boar meat, etc.

Moose tartare with red caviar is like really outstanding! With rosé wine? Kind of strange? Yes, but it’s really good!

Sous vide 100 min egg on the most delicate latka with violet potato chips is Awesome! Again with rosé.

Despite all this splendor, the place’s very liberal. It feels like you’re in Stockholm or Copenhagen. It has a very Scandinavian vibe.

Marinated cauliflower with cod (this is the exact order of priority) and slightly smoked yolk. Yes, please! With Chablis? Of course!

Waiters? — I adore them and I’m ready to trust them with my life! Meanwhile the restaurant’s full. Sometimes one of the cooks bring you the food. Why do you have to wait? Once cooked, immediately served.

You try to run out to smoke a cigarette, but they’re already bringing you caramelized cauliflower with some kind of local cheese in caramel and creamy sauce. “No smoking! No smoking! Please, have a seat!” And for your obedience they pour you some Piedmont Arneis. So you sit pretty and paw, you behave.

Saint-Émilion Grand Cru 2006 is not exactly at the level it should be because of the lack of tannins and the dizziness it impose on you, but the lamb’s leg with béchamel and salad immediately restores the balance. Moutton-mutton. It can’t go wrong. It’s no tender New Zealand but a RAM! Which indeed tastes like a RAM!?????

Suddenly Estonian sweet apple wine’s coming from around the corner and you expect pretty much anything of it but what you feel on your tongue is Pedro Ximénez. Sweet sherry, raisin… I made a picture of it: produced and bottled at the Poltsamaa winery, Estonia, 500 ml 14% vol. No mistakes. And some sweet-sour dessert made of yogurt-cottage cheese and rhubarb with currant juice as a farewell combo.

K.O. Kaks Kokka wins! Well done!

First of all, it’s beautiful.

A restaurant being also an art gallery is not the most widespread concept. Dark canvases of Dutch and English masters on white plaster background create an impression of portals to another world. Add some proper design solutions and attention to the interior minutiae such as miniature replicas of the main chandelier in the hanging lamps and 17^th century candlesticks. The place is cozy and light, not overloaded with details, located in the Old City.

There’re only eight tables + a separate room for a big company.

Secondly, it’s delicious.

There’re fifteen positions in the menu. However, they promise to introduce another ten by September. Emphasis is laid upon local products. This is contemporary Baltic cuisine at its best, which makes full use of the latest advances in science and technology.

Tomatoes fresh/dried on goat cheese broken by nitrogen with a variation of pesto. Stroganina of three types of fish beneath seaweed. Sous vide guinea fowl with baked parsley root. Pike patty with cucumbers and a vegetable side dish. A play of textures, temperatures, taste, and color.

There is a tasting set, but you have to order it in advance.

In spring they changed the chef. The duo of Orm Oja and Mart Klaas was replaced by Alexander Kolomar who got the cook of the year award at TallinFoodFest 2016. This castling didn’t affect the kitchen anyhow badly.

Excellent wine list. Different types of homemade herb-flavoured vodka. Local cider and beer. Cocktails.

The waiters are really cool, no fuss or servility, but they know their business. The owners are hospitable, they will make your night unique.

If you visit Tallinn, this is a must have!

Generally, Verona’s gastronomy is as scandalous as its literary portrayal. Romeo and Juliette were most certainly wolfing down horses, just sayin’.

Horse meat, Caval, is a Veronese favorite up to this day, and somewhere, in a hush way, they serve donkey meat, which used to be extensively consumed.

Back in the day, under siege, a law was passed, allowing the citizens to devour all of the freezing four-legged human companions, after soaking them in wine and spice, to avoid poisoning.

These sad times of local gastronomical history are long gone, and Verona is now packed with restaurants of all kinds, but Caval, along with risotto di amarone, still tops the bucket lists of all the wandering foodie pilgrims.

We don’t care for Michelin. We want makeshift and «wow».

Like always, we got to some shit hole of a place and found a treasure more amazing than any dead donkey’s ears.

Tortellini shop Bottega della Gina with take-away does not serve up any overdried dwarfy stuff, instead, they are real fresco, gigantic types. After a portion of 8 you leave happy and satisfied.

That day they had 16 varieties.

The BOMB is the one with radicchio and red wine. To blow your head off, there is spinach and lamb. All-around proper ones are with truffle and white mushrooms. To be overwhelmed beyond, get the three meats type.

The menu and the shelves held not a single bottle of wine, but the owner interpreted our signals correctly and straight away arranged for some bottles of amarone to be brought to us from the neighboring shop. One of which we finished off right on the spot, taking the others to go.

I steered clear from the horsemeat tortellini. Not in this lifetime, not yet. Not Veronese in spirit. We also skipped the newly-built Juliette’s house.

Instead, we walked off those tortellini, washing it down with amarone, hanging around the streets of this unique city, one of the most beautiful in Italy.

It is not at all about Juliette or Romeo.

May Shakespeare forgive me.

Los Angeles, Porto, Marrakesh, Cascais, Lima, Tokyo, Volterra.

I’m often attracted by the phonetics of the names. I won’t go to a place, the name of which is unpleasant to hear (I fought against “Selfie” for quite some time, but the food did overwhelm eventually). The same here, I was almost sure that a place named «Pies, Wine and Goose»™ can’t be bad.

It is nice when your expectations hold true, and it is even nicer when you first think they would fail but in the end everything turns out to be suddenly better than you could imagine.

We enter and sit down.

Post-hipster, “warm” design, almost imperceptible, with Tsvetnoy Boulevard behind the windows. Few visitors are around in the afternoon.

Ok, but let’s talk about the food while the hillocks on the taste buds are still fresh.

Moscow restaurants are like an ocean: a boundless mass of waves rolls in and out, but even on a sunny day only some rare sparks boil in the useless water.

Here everything’s even burning!

For example, pies. Ok, I love pies, but the Moscow shitty “concept of a pie” drives me crazy: there’s way too much dough that spreads out to the horizon, and way too little no-one-knows-what inside that’s supposed to make me think I’m not wasting my money.

A straight-away no.

Here all the pies are of the hockey puck size and the fillings are very complicated like pear with meat, or chopped greens with cheese. Consider the price of just 90-150 ₽. So what we have here is «a new trend»:

“Yes, sure, I’ll have a pie basket. What do I need your bread for?!”

All the food here is kind of insinuating like those owls™, which are not what they seem: everything in the menu is very simple, and this is even more true about the prices (they’re just elementary), but when you put a spoon into your mouth, you find a whole palette of taste there.

Flowers and colors in your plate for just €10. Temperature gradients, that’s my drug. Hare kidneys, burning-hot sauce, cabbage and sub-zero cabbage. You scoop it with a spoon from bottom to top, you close your eyes and moo.

It’s a truly sacred place, a point on the ley lines grid. Goddess of Luck please give them luck and enough work, so that they never spoil.

Do enjoy.

PS: Oh yes, and the grape goose soup. Hurry up to get it before the season’s over.

I’ll be brief: pilaf is fucking good in here. Yeah, it’s really fucking great!

We’ve tried it in other places, including the fancy ones. Nothing special.

Ok, the truth is that we came by midnight, and in “Uzbechka” there was nothing left but pilaf and tea as they honestly told us. They make pilaf in one huge kazan and only afterwards they endow it with a certain set of additives according to the different names in the menu. Naturally, it comes to an end very quickly. But as long as it hasn’t finished yet, it scatters you all over. It’s low-fat and in each rice grain there’s a “symphony of taste”.

Very, very, very delicious pilaf, man.

Huge portions, but you keep staying there and, though feeling a little ashamed, you still try to eat it all up because to quit eating is absolutely impossible.

That’s it.

If you like to eat delicious food and you’re stuck in Astana for a week… well, my condolences.

Even if you’re stuck in the super-luxury Ritz, which has Selfie and superb breakfasts.

Paradoxically, if you compare it, for example, to Almaty and its great meat / pilaf Klondike, but infernal interior/atmosphere, here in places of the same type you find absolutely nothing interesting except for the just mentioned infernal interior/atmosphere.

All they have is meat: it’s of high quality, served on five-meter skewers, but that’s it.

There’s never any “wow”, they have fucking nothing to strike and amaze you!

Except for one nuance: “Qazaq Gourmet”.

Actually, if someone in the city, where the norm is presented by “chicks/glitters/hookah/pathos” ™, gives to his author’s restaurant such a name, which is very self-ironical on my taste, it can’t be bad.

I’m not ready to mess around with all the names in the menu. But I can assure you that we went for all the dishes with the most incomprehensible letter combinations. And obviously we had meat.

The only thing I can remember is dry powder/chees “qurt”, which came with noodle soup instead of parmesan.

Everything was tasty indeed, something more, something less.

And this everything, unlike the rest local food, does make sense: it’s invented with a certain purpose and supplied with additives, gratin, sauces, which are made of some berries or wild plum, with something unknown that can hardly be pronounced but is delicious. Behind all this one can feel thought and labor and not just «arugula with shrimps» ™.

The night before was the infernal Friday night, so the head was exploding and the Kazakh version of okroshka with ayran, poured by two hands, as if by two-handed weapon, was really helpful.

Then there appeared people with musical instruments, and the moment they sat down on a small cozy scene similar to a yurt, we knew we were fucked.

But suddenly the national instruments revealed ultra-melodiousness and quietness that made us sit there and float, and float, and float to their sounds, even with our Friday’s head.

Being an adept of panna cotta, I most vividly remember the local panna cotta 2.0, made of milk and something like plum sorbet. All the details of the fatty mousse were strongly emphasized in it. It had a barely perceptible complicated semisweet aftertaste.

At the end the waitress, bringing us the casket with the account (for 5 people) and a pen in a special case, asked:

“Any comments regarding the kitchen?”

“This is the second restaurant in the city where one can actually have something to eat!” we answered honestly.