Expats and Experts Quest After Spicy Heat in Tallinn
Once, spicy food lovers were lucky if they found a peppercorn in their sült.
You'd have to hunt long and hard, often in the cold ground, for something "vürtsine," "krehvtine" or "pikantne" - words that came through Western European languages and mean pungent or strongly flavored. Usually it signified a product from a plant in the brassica family - such as horseradish or mustard - which could, it's true, pack a brief jolt to the sinuses.
But for warming the mouth and insides and stimulating endorphins, you were largely limited to vodka. The background level of Scoville units - the scale used to measure spicy heat that is an obsession for some - in society was negligible.
An American comic and writer living in Tartu, Stewart Johnson, tells a story about those early days. He had dinner guests over and made them something that was vürtsikas, maybe krehvtine.
"I added a tiny bit too much black pepper for them," he recalls. "They gave me angry looks, with red eyes, asked why I'd done that to them."
It took a long time for the wounds to heal and for Johnson to convince them it wasn't a practical joke. And that wasn't even "tuline" or "terav" (spicy hot).
Mid-1990s: ~1,000 Scovilles
In the Soviet period, Georgian chilis and Hungarian hot paprika did make a sporadic and unreliable appearance, but freedom brought globalization: jalapeños, as most menus insisted, "jalopenos."
Places like Ervin's Tex-Mex, the first place in 1990s Tallinn to offer "south of the border" food that wasn't Latvian, stuffed the pods with cheese and battered and deep-fried them. There's always been some place in Tallinn to get chili poppers with your beer.
Bolstered by finer-dining establishments such as Maharaja, another early 1990s fixture, things heated up at an accelerating rate. It was like Moore's Law, except with Scoville units.
Late 1990s: ~5,000 Scovilles
Supermarket produce sections started carrying shrink-wrapped styrofoam trays of chilis - serranos and Asian-type finger chilis. Sometimes they were hot, but sometimes only the last centimeter of the stem end had any bite. You could never know.
In the early 2000s, boutique chocolateries started opening and most of them carried a chili truffle product.
More Asian takeout restaurants opened, coding their food with little chili icons to warn people.
ChiliFest was held in July 2005 just outside Tallinn. As ERR News reported in 2010, this annual American-style cookoff originated when an American, Chuck Czepyha, voiced his disgust with local chili to his chef-friend Michael Bhoola.
As the decade wore on, Tabasco sauce could be spotted in more and more cruets at upwardly mobile lunch places in Tallinn.
2010: ~10,000 Scovilles
In 2010, the hottest restaurant in town - Gotsu - opened, without any coding. Default mode here was very, very hot, with heat in the broth and a stripe of gochujang sauce running around the rim of the bowl to provide a different band of the spiciness spectrum.
It should probably be mentioned that the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed in Tallinn in July 2012.
In the second half of 2012, the Finnish supermarket Stockmann started selling fresh habaneros (Scoville levels in six figures) and has carried them ever since.
In March 2013, a pepper from India called Bhut Jolokia is due to arrive in an Old Town shop. It will be possible for home consumers in Tallinn to reach 1,000,000 Scoville units.
Many entrepreneurs, one name
Eero Teinemaa of Chilli's on Müürivahe is the man behind the Indian import, which will be the newest addition to his lineup of extremely fiery sauces. Most personal defense products like mace are hard to get without a license in Estonia, but Bhut Jolokia - the ghost chili - is an area of interest to the Indian military.
Teinemaa is a homegrown Estonian who emigrated to the US and returned late last year, bucking the demographic trend to pursue his calling.
He spent 12 years in America, mostly along Florida's Gulf Coast, operating a transport company. He grew fond of hot sauces early on, and admits to putting them on just about everything.
"No, not on mulgikapsad," he laughs, when asked about a savory yet notoriously grey and lumpy braised sauerkraut dish from southern central Estonia that is a national classic. "But definitely on fried potatoes."
Teinemaa says Chilli's will close for a few days this month and then reopen with expanded shelf space and even hotter sauces, including the Jolokia pods.
There's a novelty element to the place, and he has seen mainly foreign and tourist business since opening in December.
His first customer on the day we visited was an Estonian woman who wandered in, apparently looking for a nearby natural products store. Not missing a beat, Teinemaa steered her over to his one shelf of Estonian mustard honeys and sea-buckthorn condiments.
But he's drawn praise for the quality and breadth of his sauce inventory - not just entries with "insanity" and "death" in the brand names, in other words, but gourmet, habanero-based sauces.
He says he recently dispatched a large order to Ukraine, to an American who has spent time both there and in Estonia.
Even those who haven't made the trip down have already heard the burning word.
"Excellent flavors!" exclaimed John Sullivan, a university teacher from the American Southwest living in Estonia.
Sullivan is arguably Tallinn's Mr. Chili. He has participated in a number of cookoffs here and is the "sole and undefeated" champion in the hottest chili category. A New Mexico and Texas native, he's the guy who was tapped by Kanal 2's TV cooking show to demonstrate his talents.
Sullivan himself is in the market for dried pods, and gets them at a store called Piprapood that probably has the country's biggest selection of general spices and seasonings. "Mati (Rand), the owner, has a great supply of dried peppers, and spices ranging in heat from a nice warm tingle on the tongue to blistering mouth murderers!" he wrote ERR News.
A controversy over the origin of New Mexico state peppers is currently raging with Old Mexico, but no rancor comes up in our brief chat - he credits Teinemaa for carrying Bufalo sauce, a leading Mexican hot sauce, prized by many connoisseurs.
But he says, "stock up now." Past ethnic and food specialty shops have had an especially short life in Tallinn.
Half of the people ERR surveyed by Facebook and in person who had an opinion on the subject identified Gotsu as the #1 hottest restaurant in Tallinn or even all of Estonia.
Gotsu (or technically gochu) means chili in Korean. It's also slang for a certain body part, says proprietor Kyuho Lee - but it's clean, little-kid slang, just about the equivalent of the Estonian "noku."
Lee (the "Kim's kitchen" on the sign is just a generic tag he uses to identify the nationality of his restaurant) opened Gotsu in Kadriorg in 2010 but moved to the Uus-Maailm neighborhood a year later.
Koreans consume more than half of the world's red chilis, according to some estimates. Lee's peppers are sourced from his parents, who grow it - more as a hobby, he says, but in sufficient quantity to meet the needs of a small Tallinn restaurant.
Lee, who hails from Jeonju, the home of a classic Korean soul food dish called bibimbap, says his is Korean food the way Koreans eat, reflecting home cooking with a little bit of globalization. As such, he says it's even more authentic than some kitschy barbecue place.
Responding to occasional criticism, he says: "It's just like someone who has been to Olde Hansa and has eaten bear meat there and thinks that's what all Estonian restaurants should be like."
What's different about Gotsu is that it is popular among Estonians. It's the unofficial lunch joint for Finance Ministry crowd next door and the denizens of the Bohemian Uus-Maailm neighborhood also feed the customer pool. On a recent visit by ERR News, ETV personality Priit Kuusk was ensconced in the traditional Korean dining room with his family.
We saw no slapstick scenes of people in distress (though some have related a few tales at neighboring tables). For his own part, Lee says some of the restaurant's dishes are too spicy for his own taste, but says he has not toned down the heat, in the interests of keeping it authentic.
Hunting unicorns
An interesting trend emerged from ERR's admittedly unscientific and informal surveys and conversations. Where our artist saw Tallinn in flames, one nationality - Americans - tend to see only a few wisps of smoke here and there.
Sullivan says the Tallinn restaurant scene hasn't impressed him with notable heat.
Other than Shimo, where he praises the chili poppers, there's "no heat anywhere else. "Even at restaurants that mark the dishes as 'Two Peppers' hot (think Chinese and Thai places) the food has no kick at all. The chili they serve in the Mexican food places here tastes like bolognese sauce."
"This is not a hot food appreciation market."
Scott Abel, another university teacher from the States who is a onetime Foursquare mayor of Gotsu, agrees.
Finding spicy-hot food in Tallinn, he says, "is like hunting unicorns:"
Stewart Johnson says restaurants don't embrace the whole spectrum of chili peppers. "I have found that very few restaurants in Tallinn offer quality heat," he says. "Most eateries think that spicy food is made so by simply pouring in powdered acid rather than quality cooking. I've had two-star spaghetti that made me cry, four-star curry that made me laugh."
Yet there's enough anecdotal evidence from others surveyed by ERR to sketch a fairly reliable map of unicorn sightings. Here are a few places to check out:
* One correspondent, an American tourist, reports going to the central market and finding that the sauerkraut ladies' many options include a beet-tinged variety flavor with "not an inconsiderable amount of cayenne powder."
* Cantina Carramba's sopa de chiles in Kadriorg ("hot going in and just as hot going out", says a neighborhood resident), like a cross between posole and a New Mexican red.
* Asian Aroma's authentically inland-Chinese slightly-off-tasting chili sauce (free on request) is not far behind, a "unrelenting blast of floral jungle air").
* Kairi-Kaia Truusa, the operator of Koht, on Old Town bar (who at last birthday party ate a fresh habanero whole without visible reaction) says Bollywood's papaya salad is "as spicy as anything that can be imagined."
* Mari Sarapuu, a young professional originally from Pärnu, reports that Texas Honkey Tonk & Cantina's chili con carne is "über-hot."