Last July I was in Finland and I went to the Rante Restaurant in the Radisson SAS Hotel in Espoo in Finland is an Italian restaurant which also serves some Finnish dishes.
I had originally walked into Haguland (Tapiola) to see if I could get a meal there (as I am generally not a great fan of hotel restaurants) and couldn’t find anything open or the only other choice was McDonalds.
So after quite a nice walk, I went back to the hotel and went into the restaurant. I sat down at a table and looked over the menu.
I decided that an antipasto would be nice, followed by carpaccio and then the reindeer.
For the antipasto I asked for prawns in pesto, and thought this would arrive quickly.
Fifty minutes later it did!
A small bowl of small prawns in pesto arrived, I don’t know why I thought they would be grilled prawns, but they were not.
I did not have to wait as long for my next course, beef carpaccio.
This was superb, coming with some weird leaves (more like grass) and some what I think were very large pickled capers!
I then thought ah not too long to my main course, couldn’t have been more wrong, forty minutes later it eventually arrived.
Well the reindeer was certainly worth the wait and certainly not what I expected. On the way to the Hotel from the airport I used a Yellow Line taxi, these are communal shared taxis, one of the occupants, a shipping consultant for the Silja Line, had mentioned in passing conversation that when he had reindeer he had found it very strongly flavoured akin to venison. So I was expecting the reindeer fillet to be very strongly flavoured, but it wasn’t it was very delicate, tender, almost melt in the mouth. It came with a fantastic sauce, a few vegtables. I had asked for the chive mash to be replaced with french fries (as that was what I fancied.
I decided against a desert as the neighbouring table had to wait an age for theirs and it was getting late.
Overall I was pleased with the quality of the food, the only real disappointment was the prawns.
The carpaccio and the reindeer were excellent.
