Tallinn - An Overview, and Restaurants Not To Miss

Tallinn Old Town in winter

But first, allow me to explain why we were in Tallinn.

I'd hardly heard of Estonia until they introduced the relatively avant-garde concept of an e-Residency. (read more here). It kind of sounds like setting up a company on the Cayman Islands, except the residency is for you, personally, for instance, you can open a bank account like a local and even start a medical record and get prescriptions. Almost any generally law-abiding person from almost anywhere in the world can get one, giving you the right to operate out of Estonia without even having set foot in the country. I decided that at some point, I wanted to visit a country that thinks so out-of-the-box.

NUR - More Than Bearable Lightness of Being

Oyster - NUR Feast menu, June 2014

(Sorry about the punny title. I couldn't help it... #notsorry)

This is going to be another one of those posts with photos collated from several meals at NUR, which I currently have a restaurant crush on.

NUR is completely different to anything that's available in HK. It's not solely "organic" for the sake of it, and although often touted as "new Nordic", it's not a wholesale import, or carbon copy (thank goodness) of nouveau Scandinavian/Noma-esque cuisine.

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Day - Hong Kong is in on it!

This Saturday, May 19th!

Have you heard Jamie Oliver's TED Prize speech from back in 2010? This was soon after he finished "Food Revolution", his TV series in the United States, where he went to a town named Huntington in West Virginia, apparently the town with most people classified as "obese" in the US.

If you don't have 20 minutes to watch the whole thing, don't worry, I'm going to highlight a few key things for you, but please see those bits at least.

At the beginning of this video (around 02:22) he shows some stats - everyone reads so much and is so freaked out about homicide, but that's the last thing on the list that's killing people. The first few are largely preventable through diet - heart disease, diabetes, stroke.