Hõlm

When Hõlm opened, it shot straight to the top of Tartu’s dining scene. Its atmosphere is formal and elegant from beginning to end, the whole experience enhanced by the city’s most extensive champagne list and a treasure trove of precious wines available by the glass.

Lauri Ülenurm, its head chef, was a famous sportsman, and it’s with a sportsmanlike discipline and determination that he keeps pushing Hõlm to new, winning heights. By now, the initially so obvious ambitions and efforts have mellowed and been replaced by the self-confident work of an experienced professional. Many of the menu’s dishes have their roots in the owner’s grandmother’s hundred-year old recipe books. Last year, the restaurant published a cookbook to showcase the roots of Hölm’s cuisine and its evolution. On the plate, the original fare is barely recognizable, what was once “fine” dining remains fine, just in an altogether different way, albeit underpinned by familiar flavors. The common, cream-drenched potato gratin of yore has become a modern vegetarian affair that eschews most of the tubers and the heavy cream in favor of vegetable-stuffed squash blossoms and fermented pine shoots.

A meal at Hölm is a contemporary feast, stuffed with history and spiced with the fate of the original cookbook owner who was deported to Siberia, recipes in hand, enduring hardship and endless winters before she returned to Estonia where she weathered the difficult transition years and inspired culinary innovation.