Restaurants & Cafés
Porvoo - a food - lover´s paradise!
In Porvoo there was one high-quality cellar-restaurant in the late 18th century. In addition, the town had one inn for every 30 inhabitants. In a town of a couple of thousand inhabitants this was considered detrimental to decency and law and order. Coffee houses became more common and they drew customers away from the inns. Beer and wine were replaced by more healthy beverages. However, the state was not happy to see money flowing out of the country for the purchase of coffee beans. The drinking of coffee was prohibited three times, the last time in 1799. So-called “coffee-sniffers” made rounds of inspection, confiscations and denunciations... However, the prohibition of coffee failed because of the impossibility of supervising it and the culture of coffee drinking once again began to flourish. In the 19th century the Porvoo restaurants and coffee houses were popular destinations for pleasure outings from Helsinki.
Porvoo is a town of bakeries, redolent with the scent of baking bread, local cakes and pastries like Runeberg’s cake. History comes alive in gastronomical delights – whether you order a banquet fit for a king or a menu reminiscent of the Diet of Porvoo. The fish dishes of the coastal region, Baltic herring and salmon, are favourites with the people of the Porvoo region. Fish soup in fact plays an important role in the history of Porvoo; it was, after all, the cooking of a fish soup that started the Fire of Porvoo (1760).