Patricia Hotel

Tag: latvia

  • Four Easy Day Trips from Riga

    Riga sits at the centre of a country small enough that a great deal of it is within a day’s reach. Trains and long-distance buses leave from the central stations frequently, journeys are measured in tens of minutes rather than hours, and none of the trips below requires a car. Four stand out as reliably worth the effort for a visitor with a spare day.

    The coast

    Jurmala is the obvious first choice and the easiest. A stretch of white sand and pine forest runs for kilometres along the Gulf of Riga, lined with wooden villas from the resort’s late nineteenth-century heyday. The train takes around half an hour, runs regularly, and stops at several points along the resort so you can walk a section of beach and return from a different station. In summer it is busy, in winter it is bracing and nearly empty, and both versions are worth seeing.

    The river valley

    Sigulda lies inland, about an hour by train, in a broad forested valley of the Gauja river. It is the closest thing Latvia has to dramatic landscape: sandstone cliffs, viewpoints across the valley, a cable car strung between the sides, and the ruins and restorations of several castles within walking or cycling distance of the station. Autumn is the season it is famous for, when the valley turns colour, and it is correspondingly busy then.

    • Check return times first. Services thin out considerably in the evening, particularly on Sundays.
    • Buy tickets at the station. Simpler than the alternatives and rarely a queue outside peak hours.
    • Take food for the smaller destinations. Options can be limited outside the main season.
    • Allow for walking. Several of these sights are a genuine walk from the station, not a short hop.

    The palace

    Rundale is a large eighteenth-century baroque palace with formal gardens, built for the same court architect who worked in St Petersburg, and it is the grandest building in the country by some distance. It is the least convenient of the four by public transport, requiring a bus and a connection, so it suits a full day rather than a half. The restored state rooms and the rose garden in June are the reasons people make the trip.

    The wetlands

    Kemeri National Park, just beyond Jurmala, protects a large raised bog crossed by a boardwalk trail through pools and stunted pines. It is flat, easy, and completely unlike anywhere else within reach of the city. Early morning in autumn, with mist sitting on the bog pools, is the version photographers come for.

    Any one of the four fits comfortably into a day from the city with time to spare. If you only have one spare day and no strong preference, take the train to the coast; it is the shortest journey and the least likely to be spoiled by weather.

  • 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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