How Travel in Tallinn Helped Me Find My Footing Again
In Tallinn, Estonia I learned what it meant to walk with purpose and create with conviction
While I had always heard good things about Tallinn, Estonia with must-visit headlines seeming to multiply all the more in recent months, it was still such a lovely, lovely surprise. Unquestionably, one of Europe’s most inviting and charming sleeper cities, Tallinn is a whimsical yet contemporary destination and one I connected to instantly. It has a sweet, endearing spirit that seduces me even now as I write this reflection in earnest nostalgia from back home in Chicago.
Tallinn found countless ways to reorient my restless creative energy, rouse and tantalize all five of my senses and restore my waning, weary and wishy-washy self-confidence. Its effect took shape over inventive but accessible balanced and beautiful dishes with sophisticated, comforting flavors and ingredients, in between collisions with locals who rekindled a conviction in my purpose through simple but mighty gestures of kindness and validation, and through pauses inspired by personally uncharted moments of contemplation over heavy topics that had once only occupied my history books and exams.
Tallinn was a gentle, easy city to move about in, a gracious host who granted the space and fresh air needed to explore not only its treasures and shadows but the ones that danced and swirled about inside my head. Even fifteen days into my Poland-Baltics trip, I still found myself lapsing into fits of catastrophizing about where my self-determined future would eventually carry me. I started to doubt if I had the makings of an entrepreneur at all – the fortitude it took to confront so much uncertainty and the courage to go all in for my dreams.
And yet, as much as on some days I wanted nothing more than to cave to temptation and trade my dream of building my own thing for a certain, steady paycheck, I knew deep down that wasn’t the answer. After all, for the first time in my life I had an idea brewing deep inside of me that I felt compelled to bring into the world. The more I protected and nourished that idea, the more effective I became at quieting the defeatist talk track that had underscored so much of my first trip out as the founder of The Untethered Traveler. The more I focused on what I had to create instead of the deficit I was coming from, the more I inspired carefree curiosity to set the rhythm and tone for the rest of the trip.
When that carefree curiosity came up against the creative spirit of Tallinn, I felt my creative reservoir fill up again. It became easier to write, to pause and to breathe. I felt freer to follow my compass, to trust my gut and to seek out that which moved me. The best way I can describe it, is it felt like a transference of energy, an infusion of creativity where and when I needed it the most, and a most satisfying swell of expectation and anticipation.
With Taste as my compass I would explore Tallinn’s workshops, galleries and local boutiques with a renewed gusto. I fell in love first with finds at the Tallinn Design House in the Rotterman Quarter a collection of historic brick buildings full of trendy shops, restaurants and beautiful people situated just across from Old Town. On the other side of Old Town in the Telliskivi Creative City, a redeveloped old industrial complex with more trendy artisan boutiques, workshops and restaurants, I bought more local goods including a piece from a local ceramic artist I came to love – Kauri Kallas, who gave off Basquiat vibes. In Old Town just across the street from my hotel, I bought a one-of-a-kind handcrafted winter hat from a too-cute shop at the opening of St. Catherine’s Passage. Each find was an opportunity to connect and bring home a story that would live beyond that point of purchase and the physical dimensions of the objects themselves. It’s why I feel like my home is full of artifacts and stories from around the world, not soulless souvenirs or kitschy clichés.
Understandably, cataloging memories of bites and sips requires a different tactic. My first taste of Tallinn came in the aforementioned Rotterman Quarter at Røst Bakery, who put one of my favorite breakfast pastries – a cardamom bun – back in my hand less than a few hundred miles from where I first tried it in Malmo, Sweden. Delicious isn’t a big enough word to contain my affection for this treat.
There’s tastes we track around the world and then there’s those that can only be found within the confines of a single eatery. In Tallinn that was Rado for me. It holds the distinction of being the only restaurant on my travels that I couldn’t resist returning to for a second meal. I counted seven other contenders*… I know going back to the same spot when there are so many other places to try is a travel faux pas but Rado? Rado was so very much worth the second trip back.
Some of my favorite culinary memories are those that boil down the dining experience to its most essential ingredients – the humans behind the food. That would be the case behind the bites and sips at Restaurant Ratskilva 16. As good as my meal and wine was, what a treat to find Basque Txakoli wine in Estonia, it was the server who left an impression I will not soon forget. He scribbled out a note on my bill, probably nothing to him, but everything to me. His words reinvigorated a shrinking conviction and motivated me to keep moving just as I was.
My server’s uplifting note
The gastronomic highlight of Tallinn even after all those flavors and fortuitous encounters, would be my planned splurge at One Michelin Star Noa’s Chef Hall just a short scenic drive on the other side of Tallinn Bay from Old Town. I was seated in their living room just as magic hour was transforming the Estonian world around the restaurant’s cozy compound. Through a lens that cast a warm soft glow over the Baltic Sea stretched out for what seemed like forever in front of me, I watched sailing school wrap up just as my champagne and trio of amuse bouche arrived to start the evening.
Trio of Amuse Bouche at Noa’s Chef Hall
Since it was the tourism off-season, I was able to enjoy the innovative tastes of Tõnis Siigur and Roman Sidoro’s kitchen from the best seat in the house – the chef’s table. Each dish was a culinary masterpiece in taste, storytelling and design. It wasn’t pretentious but exacting in a way that commanded respect, attention and a genuine curiosity for every bite, choice and pairing. On one hand it felt like theatre – the choreographing of all the dishes arriving just so and on the other hand it felt like a well-executed chemistry, history or social studies lesson plan. Behind every interaction, there was depth, intimacy and an evident passion for gastronomy and hospitality. The flavors were rich and intentional which made for one of those rare, extra-sensorial meals that satiate across mind, body, gut and soul.
The evening flew past as plate after plate brought one surprise and delight after the other. The most beautiful bite of Hamachi, right-out-of-the-oven bread with special, impossible-to-get French milled ash butter, fresh morel mushrooms and piles of delicate caviar. My creative reservoir was overflowing.
My favorite plate though, the first of two dessert offerings – captured the aha taste moment of the trip – besting even the Szara Ges Bird’s Nest dessert I had in Krakow. The dish was called Olive.
The Olive dessert at Noa’s Chef Hall
As I reflect in detail on this one meal, I can’t help but also recall how abundant taste was everywhere I dined in Poland and the Baltics. My mouth waters replaying some of my favorite episodes in taste from this trip. But it is often a single eye-opening, tastebud-defining, metaphor-making moment that stands apart from the others and lingers long after the evening has passed. For me that moment was Olive. Olive was a truly innovative creation of wild strawberries, almond and kalamata olives… Yes, olives and strawberries. Yes, together, for dessert.
It just worked and here’s why. The easy answer is the science behind taste made it so – think sea salt on caramel as the sommelier explained to me. The more ethereal, less technical answer is storytelling and artistry. It’s beautiful and mysterious. But I think Olive really worked because it was unexpected, untried and required us to take a leap of faith.
It was only because my compass, Taste sat me in front of this dish that I would even come to realize – in a time of my life with so much second-guessing – how much sweeter joy could taste because of doubt and uncertainty. When we take a leap of faith into the wild and unconventional, we succumb to a special kind of sweet surrender.
THE NEXT DAY
Amazingly, there was still one last collision of significance, one last lesson to be revealed in this magical Medieval city. It would come at the nudging of a shopkeeper who just minutes before was sharing the makers’ stories behind each of the handcrafted goods I bought from her. After I paid she recommended I cross the small courtyard in front of her shop into the Dominican Monastery next door. “Walk with purpose,” she said worried I might get denied at the door, “you’ll want to see what’s going on in there.”
The Monastery was serene and quiet except for the sound of a single female voice reading aloud name after name, she read a first name, then a last name, one after the other. Her pacing was steady and deliberate, her tone was somber.
Once I realized what I was bearing witness to – the uninterrupted reading of 22,600 Estonian names who had died under Soviet Communist rule – chills immediately broke out across every inch of my body and my legs became weak and heavy. It was hard to swallow and hold back tears. I was just hearing after all a tiny fraction of the loss. The reading would take almost 23 hours to complete but it took only a few minutes to comprehend just how much potential, contribution and love was lost over five decades in this beautiful country. It was heartbreaking and it was real.
As I left the Monastery that evening through the same small courtyard it was not lost on me that I have been immensely blessed my entire life with freedom, opportunity and privilege. How could I use my position and my calling to spread the transformative power of travel for good and healing? And how could I see my calling, not so much as a gift but as an obligation to help the broken but beautiful world around me?
“Walk with purpose,” I thought. It’s how every worthwhile mission begins.
*The seven other restaurant contenders for a trip back: Bianca in Warsaw, Noah in Krakow, Ida Kuchina in Wroclaw, Soul Kitchen in Warsaw, Augustin in Vilnius, Street Pizza in Riga and Varav in Tallinn (avocado toast picture above).
