Helsinki cuisine goes increasingly ethnic

First it was the Chinese and the Thais, then the Japanese, and now there are around 200 ethnic restaurants in the capital

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By Matti Huhta
     
      Helsinki’s restaurant assortment has rapidly grown more international and taken an ethnic turn.
      According to estimates from people in the trade, there are now nearly 200 restaurants in the capital that could reasonably call themselves “ethnic”, out of a total of roughly 1,150 establishments that have received a liquor licence.
      "The process of internationalisation really began back in the 1970s, when people started travelling abroad in numbers. As new destinations were added to the tourism mix, the number of ethnic eateries has kept on growing”, says a Finnish restaurant researcher, Merja Sillanpää.
     
The strongest inroads into Helsinki dining have been made by Asian restaurants, in particular those from the Far East. There are currently reckoned to be around 100 of them vying for the eating-out trade.
      Alongside the inevitable Chinese and Thai restaurants, there are nowadays more and more Indian places to be found, and restaurants emanating from the Arab regions.
      Sillanpää says that people’s dining habits have changed at a brisk pace and the willingness to try out new tastes has grown.
     
“The availability of relatively inexpensive lunches, in spite of a general rise in food prices, has taught more and more Finns to get to know other food cultures”, is Sillanpää’s take on matters.
      She believes that Asian food, cooked in oil and with an abundance of vegetables, is nourishing and healthy “even with the white rice that goes with it”.
      The urban-dweller is also a fashion-conscious creature.
      “I believe that for instance we will see more Japanese restaurants springing up here, too. The trends show up first in New York and on the U.S. West Coast”, she says.
     
Anni Pelkonen, a researcher at the Hotel & Restaurant Museum in Helsinki, says that it is quite difficult to estimate the number of Helsinki's ethnic restaurants, owing to the vague nature of the concept: if one takes things literally, the only ethnic eateries are ones where the staff and even the owners are from the original country.
      "In our view restaurants can decide for themselves whether they are 'ethnic' or not. For instance the first so-called ethnic restaurants to be established in Finland back in the 1950s were 100% Finnish-owned and run, and the only ethnic aspect to be found was in some of the items offered on the menu."
     
Pelkonen adds that the whole business of what is ethnic and what is not is further complicated by the huge variety found in the pizzeria and kebab restaurant sector.
      "One could say that ethnic restaurtants have turned into more of an everyday thing, and many of those pizza and kebab places have rather become just one part of the overall fast-food culture."
     
Marit Nieminen, the principal of the Perho Culinary School, sees the ethic invasion as a positive thing.
      "We are ourselves trying to respond to the labour shortage in the restaurant branch by arranging international training. We already have students enrolled from all over the world."
      Nieminen says that many foreigners in Finland choose to set up restaurants as this sort of enterprise is a convenient way of employing the whole wider family.
      "Foreigners also tend to have a lower threshold than Finns when it comes to setting themselves up in business", she says.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 13.9.2008

More on this subject:
 Kamppi has become Mecca for lovers of Asian cuisine

Links:
  Hotel and Restaurant Museum
  Culinary School Perho, Helsinki
  EAT.FI Helsinki - restaurants galore reviewed

MATTI HUHTA / Helsingin Sanomat
matti.huhta@hs.fi