Restaurant Rating | “I will remember the taste in years to come” – Helsinki’s new fish restaurant is expensive, but offers great experiences

Some food portions are so memorable that their taste will be remembered for years to come. The fresh orange seedling from the Boulevard restaurant is a candidate for such a dose.

The dose looks delicate, innocent and simple. Fish and sauce, no change.

In the middle of the white plate is placed a piece of reddish trout, grown in Myrskylä. It is surrounded by beurre Blanc, a buttered sauce with a crushed chives. Here and there you glimpse the orange-red dots that come from the blood orange.

The trout are lightly stewed and so soft that it almost splits out of breath. It is just as moist and succulent on the inside.

And the sauce is at the same time full-bodied but fresh and full of comfort.

It is reminiscent of spring, even though the restaurant’s window shows Ruttopuisto, which is choked by a snowstorm.

The portion is one of the best fish dishes I have ever eaten in a Finnish restaurant.

Lunch goes well in other respects as well. On the first visit, the Boulevard is just over a month old. The restaurant is operating competently, even though it opened its doors just before hopefully the last of the strict crown restrictions came into force.

The place is run by SW-Restaurants, which is Matti Wikbergin a subsidiary of BW Restaurants. Kitchen leading Sylvester Soisalo is also a partner in the place. Soisalo, in his thirties, came to the Boulevard from the Palace, and he has had a long list of foreign restaurants on his CV and worked, among other things. Gordon Ramsayn in a restaurant bearing its name.

According to the website, Boulevard is a “modern Nordic fish restaurant”. That sounds great, because there are a shamefully few fish restaurants in Helsinki. But is the characterization true? At least in its infancy, Boulevard relies heavily on French classics, whose raw materials are mainly imported goods. The Finnish subjects of the kingdom of Ahti are represented in a few doses by trout, herring and roe deer. Cod comes from Norway, sole from the Netherlands, oysters from Sweden and France, lobster from the North Atlantic and king mackerel from the indopean sea.

However, chef Sylvester Soisalo has promised that the restaurant will use domestic fish “where possible”.

Modern, of course, is that the restaurant says it focuses on responsibly grown and caught seafood. The origins and certificates of the raw materials are stated on request.

By day at least so far no separate lunch menu is available. A few dishes from the à la carte menu have been selected for the menu of the day.

There are two starters: a gesture-free nice salad and a lobster soup with a plentiful supply of lobster pieces. However, the world of taste in the soup is surprisingly strongly dominated by amaretto foam. The end result tastes unbalanced.

The party kicks off when you get to the main courses. In addition to trout, crispy cod is available. It’s wrapped in a sturdy shell and made to swim in anchovy butter that hasn’t really been spared. Of course, anchovy butter is wonderful, but when it is also accompanied by a very buttery sticky potato puree, the whole thing is unnecessarily brunch for lunch. The cod itself is flawless.

At dinner what matters most is what kind of restaurant portion is worth 49 euros. Sea turtle is, of course, a wonderful raw material. But still: 49 euros. And if you want a green salad or mashed potatoes with a sea urchin, for example, six euros more will fall into the bill.

The boulevard on the Boulevard is made à la Meunière, according to a classic French recipe. The fried fish is served with browned butter, lemon, capers and rosemary, and of course, the portion is excellent, but it should be.

Lobster is also good. Besides, half get 17 euros cheaper than a sea urchin.

Sylvester Soisalo’s promise of domestic fish is true, as mate liver and whitefish will appear on the list the week after the test visits.

Hopefully the blood orange seedling will stay on the list forever.