I started my first day in Helsinki by meeting with my new friend Aki Arjola. Aki runs Eat & Joy, which is kinda like the Eater of Helsinki, and knows everything there is to know about Finnish cuisine. He told me about dozens of fantastic new chef-owned restaurants with brilliantly refurbished midcentury interiors, serving local cuisine like wild reindeer from Lapland and berries that, due to the short growing season coupled with almost 24-hour sunshine at the height of it, ripen to a pristine, luscious flavor unknown anywhere else on the planet.

But after telling me all that, we went to this place. Why? Because, my friends. They serve meat doughnuts.

I am not talking about the soggy meat-filled pastry you may have suffered through before; if you’re a Los Angeles native you’ll forget you ever learned how to say the words samosa and empanada. These are sticky, stretchy, glazed pillows stuffed with deposits of gooey, fragrant ground beef. They’re called lihapiirakka and in Finnish that loosely translates to ‘Krispy Kreme for carnivores.’ These are hot meat doughnuts now.

This Hot Pocket of the Gods is served every day starting at 6am at Toripoljat, a dirty orange tent pitched a fish’s toss from the water on the Kauppatori square. Even in the dead of winter, Toripoljat promises a balmy 18 degrees Celsius inside, not very likely on this 0-degree day when huge puffs of steam rose from each pastry long after it was plucked from behind the counter. But it does offer a symbolically warm environment, like on this Monday morning when a jovial mix of dapper businessmen sat shoulder to shoulder with harbor workers (the mayor, who works across the street, can often be found here as well). After Aki and I sat down with our goods the table across from us was commandeered by three men in black rubber boots so thick they had to stagger their legs away from each other at the tiny cafe table. Before my coffee was cool enough to drink, the one closest to me had already put away two lihapiirakka.

Eating a meat doughnut, as the name would infer, isn’t pretty. In fact, I thought, as I wrestled with escaping meat morsels while still managing to lick every trace of sweet from my fingers, it’s not unlike putting on a big floppy baseball glove of fried bread and beef. But also like a solid pair of mittens, it kept me warm for hours.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25, 2008 at 5:03 pm and is filed under eating, traveling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.