Writer Edward Placidi went in search of authentic food while visiting the three Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and found it harder than expected. Here, he shares the treasures he found on his quest.

Save this article about authentic food in the Baltic States to Pinterest to help plan your trip. Photos by Ed Placidi. Graphic by RealFoodTraveler.com.

Unearthing the Baltic States’ Culinary Past

Touring the Baltic States, I was looking forward to sampling their traditional foods and dishes. It was almost a sisyphusian task.

There’s a wide selection of restaurants to choose from serving the gamut in ethnic cuisines from Italian to Tex-Mex, plus many talented local chefs popping out gastronomic creations. And the quality is quite high. But I struggled, enlisting the aid of the front desk at each of my hotels, to find eateries serving Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian cuisine.

A curator at a museum in Tallinn, Estonia, gave me food for thought about the dilemma: “Estonia never developed its own culinary identity, its own unique way of cooking and repertoire of dishes, because of our history. We were almost always under the rule of more powerful states, and they brought their cuisine and imposed it on Estonia.”  The three Baltic States have a long, shared history of alternating dominance by Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Russia. Others I spoke with had a simpler explanation: they prefer Continental and international foods to the limited traditional menus.

It is predominantly their pasts – the fairytale Old Towns in all three capitals have been exquisitely restored – that attract a growing number of tourists, but their native cuisines are not part of today’s typical visitor experience. Persistence, however, paid off:  the more I searched, the more places I found to sample Baltic foods.

The Baltic Restaurants We Found and What to Order There:

Baltic Food in Lithuania

Set on a small lane in Old Town Vilnius, Leiciai Aline restaurant was like entering an old-fashioned Lithuanian home with hanging pots and rustic wood tables.  I started with mead, a tavern favorite of old. Smooth and easy to drink, it was a transparent amber color with an intense honey bouquet, a hint of hops, a touch of sweetness and notes of juniper berries. Old-fashioned cold Beetroot Soup takes you aback with its intense bright pink color flecked with green. “People don’t know what to think when they see the pink color,” my server told me, “But when they try it they like the unique flavor.” Put me in that category – a refreshing, fresh gardeny taste combining pickled beets, green onions and dill, loaded with julienned fresh cucumber, topped with sour cream and a hard-boiled egg, and accompanied by delicious roasted potatoes.

Leiciai Aline restaurant’s Beetroot Soup and potatoes.

Potato dumplings or Cepelinai long were a Lithuanian staple dish. Stuffed with minced meat, smothered in chopped bacon and served with sour cream and dill (the traditional condiments on seemingly everything in the Baltics), it was a moist, savory delight. It paired perfectly with the deep brown, full-mouthed house stout (Leiciai Aline is also a brewery), fermented with five types of malt as well as chocolate. The Baltics have a long history of brewing beer, and of excellent quality.  A number of the popular breweries are hundreds of years old. It’s one time-honored tradition it’s difficult to ever see them abandoning.

Cepelinai Dumpling is another favorite at Leiciai Aline, a Baltic restaurant.

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Etno Dvaras restaurant in Vilnius’ old center was a step back in time with its walls painted with mythical characters, vaulted ceilings and heavy wood beams. The Baltics boast extensive forests filled with mushrooms waiting to be picked, and fungi have been a staple in soups and stews. The Wild Mushroom Soup at Etno Dvaras is served in a hollowed-out, mini rye loaf (rye being a predominant grain of the region), but the earthy forest flavor unfortunately was overpowered by the more pungent rye bread.

The Grated Potato Pancakes were enjoyable but not memorable with a crispy exterior and a choice of sour cream, jam or bacon topping. The local beer though never disappoints: served with a lemon slice, the Svyturio Baltas wheat beer was a tad malty and thick with heightened wheat flavor.  Svyturio is one of Lithuania’s oldest breweries, dating back to the 1700s.

Enjoy a glass of Svyturio Baltas wheat beer.

Though Lokys is Vilnius’ oldest restaurant the menu is modern gastronomy – except for a few surviving old-time dishes. The Game Sausage, blending wild boar and venison from the Lithuanian forests, was lean, strong flavored and chewy, served with the classic staple of briny stewed sauerkraut. The Brown Ale from Gubernija ‒ a legacy brewery around since 1665 ‒ complemented the sausage with it nutty notes and robust mouthfeel. The delicious Creamy Rye Bread Delicacy is a throwback to when rye flour was so important it was used as a currency and the best was fine ground to make ‘luxurious sweet bread for the nobility.’ The earthy, sweet and creamy dessert is a thick rye pudding stuffed with hazelnuts and topped with cranberry jam and burnt meringue.

Lokys restaurant in Vilnius serves authentic game sausage and accompaniments.

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Visitors pour into Trakai in the summer months to visit the spectacular fairytale castle ‒ a massive complex of red brick towers and walls seemingly floating on an island in Lake Galve, Lithuania ‒ and to munch down the traditional kibinai pies the town is famous for. Senoji Kibinine is one of several original eateries specializing in these savory pastries filled with minced pork, chicken, mushrooms, onions, cheese or a combination of these ingredients. An ideal pairing with a meat pie or two, making it a full meal at Senoji, is the region’s traditional farmers’ Sorrel Soup, a wholesome blend of fresh sorrel leaves, beef broth, diced potatoes and a dollop of sour cream.

Beautiful Trakai Castle.

Senoji Kibinine serves classic Sorrel Soup.

Baltic Food in Latvia

Province Restaurant in Riga, Latvia, was ‒ surprisingly – a stickler for tradition. The Black Peas with Smoked Bacon and Buttermilk was eaten as their grandparents did:  follow each spoonful of the oversize peas with a sip of buttermilk, mellowing the beans’ hearty texture and saltiness. Enjoying pickled herring from the Baltic Sea goes back a long ways and at Province it is beautifully presented with an array of typical local ingredients: cranberries, sliced pickles, red onion, creamy cottage cheese, boiled potato wedges and dill. Tangy, a touch sweet, a bit umami, it was a happy marriage of the sea and land in the Baltics on one plate. The Roasted Pork with Pickled Cabbage & Roasted Potatoes was all umami – and lusciously delicious with salty caramelized meat with crispy edges.

Roast Pork with Pickled Cabbe served at Province Restaurant in Riga.

Riga’s Grand Central Market, one of Europe’s largest, is brimming with every food imaginable, from caviar and smoked fish to pickled vegetables – as well as a smorgasbord of tasty traditional Latvian snack foods. Pirags can be sweet or savory – the multiple sheets of flaky pastry stuffed with minced meat, ham and cheese, codfish and potatoes, or filled with cherry, raspberry or apple and cinnamon concoctions. Piradzini are oblong sesame buns loaded with minced meat, sauerkraut, or potato and dill. Samsa, as the name suggests, are essentially Latvian samosas: a filo-like pastry shaped like a three-point star filled with beef, lamb, turkey, or tomato and cheese.

Choose from various Pirags Pies from Riga Grand Central Market.

In a small eatery in the market named Silkites un Dillitetes, I sampled a delicately flavored fish soup, called Zivju Solanba, of salmon and cod in a rich tomato broth with diced potatoes and carrots, dill and lemon juice. When I asked the proprietor about the preparation, he gave an answer that I had heard before in the Baltics: “I won’t tell you because this is a secret recipe of my grandmother’s.”

Baltic Food in Estonia

Hansa Tall restaurant in the artsy university town of Tartu, Estonia, evokes the past with its aged-wood ambiance decorated with old farm and country paraphernalia, from wagon wheels to yokes. “We have always been meat eaters in Estonia and we like our meat smoked,” bellowed the server when I asked about the menu. Indeed, my smoked-then-roasted pork rib was a large slab of meat, with a delightfully smoky-caramelized exterior and moist and meaty inside. It came with melt-in-your-mouth roasted potatoes cooked with pork juices and a crunchy, tangy cabbage salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, parsley and white vinegar. The usually shocking-pink, refreshing cold Baltic Beetroot Soup was hot, brown and savory here because it too was loaded with smoked meat, as well as sliced carrots and diced potatoes, turning it into more of a stew.

Hansa Tall Baltic Beet Root Soup.

Tallinn

In Tallinn, with help from the front desk receptionists at my hotel, I identified three restaurants that purportedly served traditional Estonian foods.  My search didn’t go well at first:  One had closed and another had changed its menu to chic gastronomy. The third, however, turned out to be a wild and crazy tavern that recreates the middle ages. III Draakon, located in Tallinn’s Town Hall, is run by a sharp-tongued “wench” who playfully berates and orders around her customers (it’s all in jest and fun). She and her staff are dressed in period costumes, the décor is right out of the 1500s – and the menu is too, with pirukas (traditional pastry pockets stuffed with meat, potatoes and/or vegetables), hearty ox-meat sausages and frothy ale.  It was tasty, great fun and, in actuality, the most traditional food I found ‒ going back hundreds of years.

III Drakon in Tallinn serves traditional ox-meat sausages, piruka pies and ale.

The dishes of the past in the Baltics were fashioned from the typical ingredients available in these cool countries of Northern Europe, including venison, boar, mushrooms and berries from the forests, fish from the sea, and rye, potatoes and cabbage from the fields. The traditional dishes and snacks I unearthed were often tasty, occasionally delicious, sometimes bland, with the menu options quite limited. So it’s not difficult to understand, in today’s abundant world and as member states of the EU, why there has been a migration to Continental favorites, ethnic cuisines and gastronomic delicacies.

But there is one time in the year when the past takes culinary center stage.  The museum staffer in Tallinn who lamented that Estonia was robbed of a culinary identity by powerful neighbors, added: “Blood sausage is our national dish but most Estonians don’t eat in anymore, except on Christmas when it is our traditional holiday meal.”

Know before you go:

Get an overview of the Baltic States, here. Learn more about Latvia, here. Learn about Estonia, here. And learn about Tallinn, here.

-Story and photos by Edward Placidi

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