Helsinki, Finland

Obviously during the COVID-19, the restaurants have had to adapt to the situation as well. Besides normal take-away food, several places have started to sell sets where most of prepping is done at restaurant and heating and final touch is given at home.

In my opinion, this concept works quite nicely, you get a feeling doing something yourself and don’t have to eat the food right away after pickup. Of course it gives some challenges to restaurant also, it can’t be too difficult to finalize the dish at home.

My first try was home-kit from recently Michelin Star awarded Inari (https://www.restaurantinari.com/). We chose the five course dinner for two (110€), the other option being three courses (80€).

Dinner started with green curry, where the mixed greens gave nice texture and the curry sauce itself was tasty. Nothing special though, but decent curry anyway. Maybe the challenges coming up with dishes that do not require too much at home realized at the next dish, citrus salad (~ 5 pieces of different fruits) with kombu (seaweed) did not really seem like most innovative nor tasty dish. Of course it served the purpose of neutralizing your taste buds after bit spicy first start.

But anyway, it was all upwards from here, first really tasty melanzane and then the superb duck pancakes. Latter one you make like tacos, you have of course the duck and then hoisin sauce, home-made sriracha (inaracha it was called, I guess), kimchi (could have been a bit spicier…), some orange with chili and a salad with dressing. The duck was a bit too done and could have been juicier (or I messed up with too much heating…). But overall, really really good.

And so was the dessert, Hoddeok (korean pancakes) with condensed milk and ice-cream. Nice touch of cinnamon, perfect!

Overall, I would definitely recommend everyone to try this and hope to see different restaurants have such offering even after normal operations are back.