New Town
For the tourist, the Old Town offers everything you really need from a visit to Estonia: history, nightlife, pretty buildings, men in tights. But for dedicated shoppers, business travellers or anyone looking for a bit of real-life action, you will need to stray a few hundred yards outside the city walls to the modern City Centre to understand what it is really all about. Just follow the (small) skyscrapers south-east of the Old Town to find yourself in the heart of bustling modern Tallinn, full of offices, hotels and shops. Within a square kilometre you will come across Tallinn’s two largest department stores (Kaubamaja and Stockmann), the massive SAS Radisson hotel, and the rather more Soviet-looking (but equally monolithic) Reval Olümpia. Around them you can sample the growing handful of cafés and bars crammed with office workers, students and real Estonians going about their business.
Great nightlife is here in abundance, if you can be bothered to go the extra mile – although it’s less compressed than in the Old Town. Try the touristy, lively bars and nightclubs of the big hotels or check out the Hotel Olümpia’s funky all-night café, a pick-up joint in its own right. Closer to town on Parnu mnt near the evocatively named Vabaduse Square (‘Freedom Square’, now a car park), VS Café draws in locals and trendy ex-pats with its combination of Indian food and dance music. For a real local favourite navigate your way to Hiireloks (‘the mousetrap’), a seedy but warm (and hilarious) Russian karaoke bar hidden in the backstreets.
If you’ve had enough of drinking, Deli 24 provides all-night hot food and drink, excellent coffee and a perfect spot for people-watching. For afternoon snacks, newly opened City Gourmet heralds great things to come in the City Centre, with its luxury deli-café atmosphere, imported Italian food and stylish interior. Or go to Energia café opposite Kaubamaja for the buzz of shoppers and workers, and a slightly kitschy, Soviet-era flavour.
There is little choice in the restaurant department, although what there is, is excellent: from trendy Moskva with its air-hostess waitresses in Vabaduse Square, and Rusthaveli, a top-notch Georgian restaurant on the second floor of a block opposite the Radisson, to Eesti Maja, a characterful Estonian restaurant Tardis-like and hidden away below street level, there is little danger of starvation here.
If you want to meet real Estonians at work and play, this is the place to be.
Old Town
For many visitors, Tallinn is the Old Town – and tourists coming for the history and the culture have little reason to wander beyond the city walls. With its perfectly preserved Hanseatic buildings and medieval Town Hall Square, old Tallinn looks almost too convincing to be true – as if it’s really a theme park. With thousands of Finns and Swedes flooding through each week, tourists wander the streets at all times of day and night. In addition, every year the town attracts ever greater volumes of visitors from further afield, and although at the moment it remains largely unspoilt, this may not last. Despite the restaurants, shops, cafés and bars, and thriving modern service industry, the medieval architecture of old Tallinn is still perfectly preserved. There’s something for everyone here – whether you are a romantic couple or a carousing stag group. And some excellent museums provide all the culture you could possibly want.
One of the great advantages of Old Tallinn is that it is small enough to walk around in a single day – and a lot can be fitted into one afternoon. Take in a gallery, spend an hour sipping hot chocolate in a cosy cellar, visit an artisan’s workshop and walk around the living museum of the ancient buildings before you settle in for a cocktail and then dinner. Dancing is never that hard to come by in the Old Town, either, with its selection of up-market and cheesier bars, disco pubs and popular nightclubs.
Old Tallinn has not been ruined by tourism. Although much of what goes on is geared towards tourists there are real Estonians making their lives here, and this is reflected in the range of excellent establishments – from faux medieval to trendy and cutting-edge. Hotels in the Old Town tend to make the most of their medieval setting – the best and most expensive are to be found in renovated merchant’s houses, with one or two slicker, more modern exceptions. Prices can be steep in high season as available accommodation gets quickly booked up and good-quality, cheaper rooms in the Old Town can be hard to come by. However, if you have the budget, this is the place to come.
The range of restaurants in the centre is superb, with everything from medieval tourist-orientated places (some of them excellent) to smart Italian and Japanese restaurants playing club-style lounge music and staffed by Prada model lookalikes. Avoid the tourist cellar restaurants on Viru; these are targeted at day-trippers from Helsinki.
Cafés come into their own in both seasons. In winter there is no lack of warm bolt-holes where you can escape the weather and enjoy well-prepared coffee and delicious hot chocolates, as well as fresh herbal teas. In summer the terrace culture emerges – and the Town Hall Square is the place to be, sitting in the sun with a cappuccino. The quality of the hot drinks is generally very good; we also recommend you try an afternoon liqueur.
Port
Tallinn is built right next to the Baltic Sea, so unsurprisingly the coast plays a vital role in the city’s life – with a huge range of maritime history and activities compressed into the few miles near the Old Town. Just outside the city walls, the ancient seaport still operates, today as a conduit for the millions of Scandinavians (mainly Finns) who arrive here every year. Take a walk past the regenerated industrial wasteland just off Mere pst, and you will find yourself face to face with the giant white ferries that make this crossing every day – spitting day-trippers out for weekend breaks and the cheap Estonian booze.
The port brings paradoxical flavours to Tallinn: formerly an area packed with factories, it is now home to some of the city’s trendiest restaurants and nightclubs, the Metropol Hotel, the London Casino and a string of popular bars. Right next to them sit a couple of dodgy hotels, a strip club and a line of shops selling cheap alcohol and catering mainly to the Finns. Estonians come to the port area for the good nightclubs (flavour of the month BonBon and student favourite, mega-club Terrarium), as well as the modish restaurants (such as the enigmatically named ‘Ö’) and live music (in bar Scotland Yard).
A mile or so along the shoreline you find yourself in altogether different surroundings – the summery district of Kadriorg, a residential suburb built by the Russians around an attractive, rolling park and an Italianate palace that has now become the celebrated Foreign Art Museum. Wood-boarded 19th-century houses give the district its special character, and on one side of the park you can watch the Baltic waves through the trees.
This is a perfect daytime get-away if the weather is fine – and increasingly the choice of habitat for Tallinn’s more affluent young professionals. If you’re staying here be aware that there’s not much in the way of nightlife, but you can start here at the chichi, minimalist Kadriorg Restaurant and then progress to the bar (or restaurant) of Bally’s Casino if you really can’t be bothered to make the 5-minute drive into town. For those wanting accommodation in this rus in urbis, there are a few boutique hotels – including Bally’s Casino itself and the Villa Stahl.
If you keep driving along the coast you will eventually find yourself in the seaside complex of Pirita: a string of spas, shops and restaurants that caters mainly to the summer and water-sports market, but is active all year around. You can stay at the unique, pristine Pirita Klooster guesthouse – run by an order of nuns – or at one of the gargantuan spa-hotels that cater mainly to Scandinavians visiting for residential beauty treatments, and offer large swimming pools, massage, saunas and excellent sports facilities. There is a marina in Pirita, a trendy beauty/health salon (Finissage), public tennis courts and also a couple of top restaurants to round off a day of virtue, including smart Charital and (further on the road out to Viimsi) the Noah’s Ark-shaped Paat. All worth a try.
Tallinn City
When you first walk into Tallinn you’ll notice something unmistakeably Disney about the town – its medieval spires glinting in the sun, the charming narrow streets and the perfectly preserved merchant’s houses – all of them overlooked by the stern towers of an ancient fortified hill. The impression is reinforced by the throngs of tourists walking the streets, the handicraft shops, and the polite young students kitted up in medieval clothing who will accost you with inducements to join a Hanseatic feast in one of Tallinn’s many themed restaurants.
But Tallinn is never as it first appears. While there is a thriving tourist industry in the centre, where foreign visitors are drawn like bees to honey by the bizarrely picturesque atmosphere, the city also hides many other worlds. Outside the Old Town there is a small modern metropolis – the Soviet and post-Soviet sprawl where most Estonians live and work (although many commute into tourist-land for their day jobs, along with shoppers and diners). But far from being a frozen museum-piece, the Old Town is host to some of the city’s best nightlife and restaurants, shops and galleries. And there is also plenty going on outside the ancient walls, from the modern city centre – more active and vibrant with every year as business grows and new shops and services open – to the trendy port area. This was once an industrial wasteland, but today is home to some of Tallinn’s choicest
nightspots. More leafy and serene, Kadriorg Park lies a few minutes’ drive outside the bustle of Tallinn’s centre and hides some of summertime’s best jewels: a beautiful park, gorgeous museums and a forest right next to the ocean. Further along the coast and you’re in Pirita, Tallinn’s marina and beach.
Like its Baltic neighbour, Riga, Tallinn has garnered a reputation for legendary nightlife, full of racy clubs and beautiful, willing women. The truth is a little different, although not always far off. Rather than cater uniquely to the fantasies of drunken sex tourists, Tallinn has the beginnings of a truly sophisticated night-time scene, from its excellent restaurants and cafés to bars and nightclubs that would hold their own in London or Paris. There is a wonderfully disorganized element to the development of the city’s entertainment, with themed restaurants ranging from Italian and Georgian to Russian, Indian and Thai, and inventive bars and cafés which will strike any pose to stand out from the crowd. The vast majority of these ‘ethnic’ businesses are owned and staffed by Estonians, proving that Tallinn has gladly embraced the role of themed town – except that no one seems sure what that theme should be. Expect waitresses costumed in medieval dress rubbing shoulders with Sikh-style doormen, and sushi bars next to Irish pubs.
Finally, it is worth remembering that this small city of 400,000 people crammed next to the Baltic Sea is long used to visitors: from the foreign armies that crossed its borders for 2,000 years to the legions of Finns that flood over every weekend from Helsinki, less than two hours away on the ferry. As a result Estonians are open-minded, curious and welcoming to guests – and tolerant of their excesses – and it’s worth getting to know a few as you pass through.
Toompea
Looming over old Tallinn and the surrounding modern city, Toompea Hill became a feudal stronghold in the 13th century when crusading German knights arrived on a Baltic campaign. As the capital developed over time the hill became home to Tallinn’s warrior classes and their servants – while the citizens of the land lived and worked underneath in what is known today as the Old Town. When medieval Tallinn began to flourish as a merchant centre the people started bargaining for greater rights: as members of the Hanseatic League (an alliance of merchant cities across Northern Europe) the citizens of the Old Town were subject after 1248 to their own set of laws and rights (the ‘Lübeck Laws’) freeing them from feudal obligations (and taxes). The folk on the hill were less lucky, although a slave could win his freedom by escaping Toompea and living in the town for a year and a day.
Today the ancient hill and its tiny quaint town remains, still fortified and medieval, very much as it might have looked in the 17th or 18th century – with the exception of the Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Cathedral, a controversial, onion-domed fantasy which is still considered heavily symbolic of Russian power. The parliament building stands next to it, cresting the eastern edge of the hill, and is today the modern seat of Estonia’s political life.
Toompea in the 21st century, however, is largely a tourist haven – the winding walk up to the fairy-tale alleys and streets are the high point of any historical tour. And the views from the look-out points are spectacular, with the rooftops of the ancient city spread out below, the modern buildings of the town centre behind them and the Baltic port full of ferry boats beyond. Unsurprisingly, there is a reasonable concentration of little restaurants, museums and cafés – some of them excellent – although you will be surprised by how empty these streets really are. Here, real life seems to have been put on hold.
Toompea is Estonia at its most Walt Disney. Other than those who work for the parliament– which exists in its own private world – the only locals you will encounter on the hill are there to serve you (although a few Talliners may wander up at sunset to catch the view). However, it is not an area you can afford to miss – not only is the medieval settlement dramatic and beautiful but it also lies at the very centre of Estonian history – so it is worth kicking back and enjoying a picturesque meal or a cup of coffee along with the tour groups.
