HELSINKI

With new cultural quarters, no-waste restaurants and a passion for design, Finland’s capital has transformed itself from overlooked city break destination into a Nordic success story.

- Chris Leadbeater

“At the start, it was hard,” Luka Balac says. “But it was great to see how quickly suppliers were willing to change their practices to work with us. Now, we’re really in the groove.”

So in the groove that it’s a wonder he has a spare minute or two to pop out from the kitchen to talk to me. With a cloth draped over his shoulder and his face shiny with perspiration from the heat of the oven, Luka is keen to explain the methods and the principles underpinning Nolla, one of Helsinki’s trendiest and most ethical eateries. You could look at Nolla as a superb example of cross-European co-operation — the other co-founders, Carlos Henriques and Albert Franch Sunyer are, respectively, Portuguese and Spanish; Balac is Serbian — but there’s far more to this dining hotspot than an exchange-project ethos. Irritated by the amount of food tossed into the bin in their prior roles in other kitchens, in February 2018 the trio decided to launch a ‘zero-waste’ restaurant where even the bread is recycled into toasted caramel ice cream, wine-bottle corks are composted and ‘single-use plastic’ is an obscene phrase.

“We only use seasonal Finnish ingredients,” Balac continues. “If we can’t source any lemons, we don’t cook with them. It’s about a mindset, about making people think before throwing something out. We aren’t perfect, but we do our best. And we’re getting better.”