Strindberg Café

Three coffees from one Helsinki roaster

Strindberg Café buys from Robert Paulig Roastery and pours three distinct things rather than one house pot. The signature blend is dark roasted, squarely in the Finnish register, and it is what arrives if you simply ask for coffee. The custom espresso blend is built for the machine and is the one to choose for anything with milk in it. Taste of Harvest is the specialty option, made from the best beans of each harvest season, hand picked, roasted in limited batches and given a processing method meant to hold on to the nuances the darker roasts deliberately smooth over. The roastery also trains the staff here, so the relationship runs deeper than a delivery van. If you want to know what the counter can actually do, order the Taste of Harvest.

An Esplanadi institution the city refused to lose

The café opened in 1992 in rooms that had held an art salon and gallery founded by the Swedish-born Sven Strindberg, and it took his name along with the address. It has been a fixture on Esplanadi ever since. When the lease ran out in 2010 and closure looked likely, a Save Strindberg campaign gathered thousands of signatures and the café stayed, which tells you what kind of place it occupies in the city's mind. The building works on three levels: a street-level café, a restaurant upstairs, and a library bar on the second floor for drinks and small plates. In summer the terrace extends the café outside, and both the café and the restaurant look over the park.

Toast Skagen, and the room it is eaten in

The dish to order is Toast Skagen. The house rates it among the best in the city and it has been one of the most ordered things on the menu for years, to the point that the kitchen has gone looking for a wine worth pairing with it. Around it, the café floor keeps to savoury and sweet plates alongside a wide coffee and tea list, while the kitchen upstairs runs Nordic husmanskost crossed with contemporary international cooking. The rooms have been worked on rather than left to age: a 2019 café renovation put a central counter at the heart of the service and added bespoke floor tiling, Art Deco wallpaper and restored wall panels, and a 2018 restaurant extension used antique and flea-market pieces alongside natural materials to keep the upstairs in conversation with the café below.