Patricia Hotel

Tag: food

  • What to Look For at Riga Central Market

    Riga Central Market is one of the few sights in the city that is genuinely a working part of daily life rather than a preserved version of one. It occupies a row of enormous former Zeppelin hangars just south of the Old Town, alongside open-air rows and a scattering of smaller halls. Locals shop there for ordinary groceries, which is precisely what makes it worth an hour of a visitor’s time.

    How the halls divide up

    Each hangar has a broad speciality, and knowing which is which saves a lot of aimless walking. One is given over largely to meat, another to dairy and bread, another to fish, and another to vegetables and preserves. The divisions are not absolute, and stalls spill over at the edges, but the general pattern holds. The fish hall is the one most visitors find striking, both for the range of smoked freshwater and Baltic fish and for the sheer volume moving across the counters on a busy morning.

    What is actually worth buying

    Smoked fish is the obvious answer and deservedly so, sold whole or by weight and best eaten the same day. Beyond that, the dairy counters are the real find: fresh curd, sour cream thick enough to stand a spoon in, and farm butter that bears no resemblance to the supermarket version. Rye bread comes in dense dark loaves that keep for days and travel well. In late summer the produce rows fill with forest berries and mushrooms brought in from outside the city.

    • Bring cash. Many smaller stalls take cards now, but not all of them, and the queues move faster with notes.
    • Go in the morning. The best of the fresh produce and fish is gone by early afternoon.
    • Buy small quantities. Most sellers are happy to sell a single portion rather than a kilo.
    • Eat on site. Several halls have counters where you can sit down with what you have just bought.

    The surroundings

    The area immediately around the market is busy, functional and not especially pretty, and it is worth being aware of your bag in the crowd as you would in any large market anywhere. The walk back toward the Old Town takes about ten minutes and passes the canal, which makes a natural place to sit down with whatever you have carried out.

    Timing your visit

    Weekday mornings are the market at its most authentic and least crowded with visitors. Saturday is fuller and livelier but harder work. Sunday trading is reduced and some halls close early, so it is the weakest day to go if you only have one chance.

    The market is not a museum and does not present itself as one. Go with an appetite and a small amount of cash, buy something you intend to actually eat, and it becomes the most memorable hour of a Riga weekend.

  • Eight Latvian Dishes Worth Trying

    Latvian cooking is built on what grows and keeps in a northern climate: rye, root vegetables, dairy, pork, freshwater and Baltic fish, and berries gathered from the forest. It is not elaborate, and it was never meant to be. What it does have is a small set of dishes that appear again and again, on restaurant menus and family tables alike, and that give a visitor a fair sense of the place in a few meals.

    The staples

    Start with rye bread, which is less a side dish than the foundation of the whole cuisine. It is dark, dense, faintly sweet and sour at once, and it is served with almost everything. Grey peas with bacon is the dish most often named when Latvians are asked what the national food is: large earthy peas cooked with onion and salt pork, plain and filling, traditionally eaten around midwinter. Cold beetroot soup is its summer counterpart, a bright pink kefir-based soup served chilled with cucumber, dill and a boiled egg, and far better than the colour leads you to expect.

    Baked and smoked

    Small bacon-filled pastries appear at every celebration and most bakeries, crescent-shaped and best eaten warm. Smoked fish is a coastal tradition and widely available in the markets, from smoked sprats to whole smoked bream. Layered rye bread pudding, made from breadcrumbs, cream and berry preserve, is the dessert that turns up most often and is a great deal more appealing than a description of its ingredients suggests.

    • Sklandrausis. An open tart of rye pastry filled with carrot and potato, sweet and savoury together.
    • Curd snacks. Glazed sweet curd bars sold in every shop and eaten by everyone.
    • Smoked sprats. The classic Baltic preserve, usually eaten on buttered rye with egg.
    • Black Balsam. A bitter herbal liqueur, an acquired taste neat and much easier mixed.

    Where to try them

    The market halls are the cheapest introduction and the most honest one. Beyond that, the canteen-style restaurants that serve office workers at lunchtime are where the everyday versions of these dishes are eaten, at everyday prices. The more formal restaurants in the Old Town do refined versions that are often excellent, but they are not where the food comes from.

    A note on seasons

    Several of these dishes are seasonal in practice even when available year round. Cold beetroot soup belongs to summer, grey peas to winter, and the berry desserts to whatever the forest produced that year. Eating them in the wrong season is not a mistake, but eating them in the right one is noticeably better.

    Eight dishes will not exhaust Latvian cooking, but they will orient you. Try the bread first, the peas once, and the cold soup on the warmest day of your visit.

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