The highlight of our sojourn in Tallinn was an excellent dinner at the prosaically named Fish and Wine restaurant. Tripadvisor made it clear that such was the popularity of the place, booking was a necessity and friends in high places wouldn't go amiss. We duly emailed a reservation request and after an anxious wait received a courteous acceptance. To our delight, on arrival we were shown to the best table with a view over the adjacent park. We'd requested an early booking so were not surprised to be the first diners and prepared smug expressions, appropriate to our prime position, with which to greet later guests. After an hour no one else turned up and we had the entire restaurant to ourselves all evening. The food was as good, or better, than promised by Tripadvisor so I can only attribute the poor turnout to the end of the season and the recession.
Exhausted by our wrangle with Tallinn's embryonic consumer culture, on the last night we decided to take dinner in the hotel. The ambience of the hotel restaurant, where we'd breakfasted daily, would suffer in comparison with a 1950s Wimpy Bar so room service seemed preferable; while the food might be indifferent, at least the surroundings would be more condusive to relaxation. Most hotels promote their room service mercilessly, charging extortionately for wheeling a trolley along the corridor to your room. In this hotel, their first reaction when I called reception was to deny they offered room service at all. I pointed out that I had dialled the number given in the directory for room service and they grudgingly transferred me to the kitchen. Eventually with a show of great reluctance, a battered card was brought to our room. There is something primitively comforting about room service. Perhaps it conjures memories of being tended during illness as a child or maybe it's simply an enlargement of the treat that is breakfast in bed. Dining in the old railway Pullmans while trundling across England induces a similar sense of cosiness and semi-detachment as the countryside slides past the window. But so low were our expectations of a hotel rusty at the nicieties of customer service that when the food arrived with crisp white napery we were hugely delighted.
The rattling of ancient trams and the glowing PricewaterhouseCoopers sign on the mirror glazed building opposite provided a disjunctive backdrop to our dinner a deux, but encapsulated my impressions of Tallinn. A disoriented city whose confused and oppressed past leaves its citizens uncertain of their present status or future aspirations.
© David Thompson 2012
Exhausted by our wrangle with Tallinn's embryonic consumer culture, on the last night we decided to take dinner in the hotel. The ambience of the hotel restaurant, where we'd breakfasted daily, would suffer in comparison with a 1950s Wimpy Bar so room service seemed preferable; while the food might be indifferent, at least the surroundings would be more condusive to relaxation. Most hotels promote their room service mercilessly, charging extortionately for wheeling a trolley along the corridor to your room. In this hotel, their first reaction when I called reception was to deny they offered room service at all. I pointed out that I had dialled the number given in the directory for room service and they grudgingly transferred me to the kitchen. Eventually with a show of great reluctance, a battered card was brought to our room. There is something primitively comforting about room service. Perhaps it conjures memories of being tended during illness as a child or maybe it's simply an enlargement of the treat that is breakfast in bed. Dining in the old railway Pullmans while trundling across England induces a similar sense of cosiness and semi-detachment as the countryside slides past the window. But so low were our expectations of a hotel rusty at the nicieties of customer service that when the food arrived with crisp white napery we were hugely delighted.
The rattling of ancient trams and the glowing PricewaterhouseCoopers sign on the mirror glazed building opposite provided a disjunctive backdrop to our dinner a deux, but encapsulated my impressions of Tallinn. A disoriented city whose confused and oppressed past leaves its citizens uncertain of their present status or future aspirations.
© David Thompson 2012
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