01 June 2026
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The forests, lakes, cold seas, farms and long seasons of Finland sit firmly at the heart of Helsinki's Boreal – the result of founder and chef Pasha Demin’s deep connection with the region. Starting his career at 17, he had long envisioned creating his own restaurant. Arriving in Finland in 2022, he had an impressive CV, having refined his craft at Noma in Copenhagen and staged at Three-Star Azurmendi in Spain's Basque Country.
After settling in, the chef knew that Helsinki was the ideal place to realise his vision, and he launched Boreal with co-founder Artur Bersirov. “The north had always drawn me in, so the restaurant was built around northern nature, inspired by the boreal region,” he explains. (The vast boreal region – also known as the taiga – is the Earth's most northernmost forest ecosystem of pine, spruce and fir, characterised by long, bitter winters and short summers.)
Demin's 40-seater contemporary restaurant in Helsinki’s quietly sophisticated Design District centres its menu around fermentation, wild foraging and a close relationship with the surrounding landscape. It sources whole animals and builds its constantly evolving menus according to what is growing in farmers’ fields at any given point in time.
Constant Communication with Farmers
Boreal maintains a close dialogue with the farmers behind its produce. Throughout the season, the kitchen receives constant updates from the fields, informing the team what is emerging, ripening or reaching its peak at that precise moment. These conversations form the foundation of the menu, meaning dishes emerge in direct response to the Finnish landscape. “Every week they send us an update: what has just come in, what is at its freshest and best. In winter, we plan together what they will grow for us in the coming season,” Pasha explains. “We give them our offcuts, such as fish scraps and seafood trimmings, and they process everything into compost.”This relationship is particularly significant within the boreal climate zone, where long, freezing winters give way to brief and intensely productive summers. Demin describes the process as “a very closed, honest loop” – in which the restaurant and the farmer operate as one.
Boreal sources its meat from farms across Finland, while seafood is selected from throughout the wider boreal region, including Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Before working with any suppliers, the team at Boreal enquires about their practices, philosophy and their methods of cultivating the land or the environment they create for their animals. Wherever possible, the team will visit suppliers in person before commencing a partnership.
“If it's vegetables, we find out how they grow them, whether they fertilise the soil or not, and whether they use pesticides,” Demin explains. “For meat or animal suppliers, we find out how they raise the animals and what they feed them. If we are talking about hunters, it is straightforward: we look at how they hunt and what hunting methods they use. This is to ensure that they are not poachers, but licensed individuals who operate officially and can show us their documentation.”
One of the restaurant’s core principles is to buy the whole animal, rather than just the premium cuts. “We do not order only the lamb loin, instead we ask for the whole carcass, or for it to be delivered in parts, so that our suppliers can also move the full animal,” Demin says. “The same applies to fish: we order whole, head on, and we think through every part – cheeks, eyes, fins, bones and all.”
‘Something Interesting’ From the Forest
Every morning, no matter the season, Demin heads out into Helskini’s forests with his dog. Amid the pines, spruces and birch trees, he “always finds something interesting.” Indeed, Finland's Everyman's Rights allow anyone to forage for wild mushrooms and berries in the countryside, and Demin and his team take full advantage of their right to roam. They regularly head out to forage for mushrooms, bladderwrack seaweed, lingonberries, blueberries, wild currants, spruce shoots, rosehip blossoms and meadowsweet flowers. These self-harvested ingredients are almost always present on Boreal’s menu, whether fresh, pickled, dried or fermented.
A Hub of Fermentation
Fermentation is one of the practices Boreal is best known for. Demin notes that at Boreal, fermentation is not a trend, but instead a practical way to extend the Nordic seasons and develop depth of flavour. “I started exploring fermentation about 10 years ago, beginning with the basics like kombucha bread,” he says. “Today we are working at the advanced level: we grow our own koji rice in-house and we make our own miso pastes and soy sauces.”The restaurant’s extraordinary range of non-alcoholic drinks is fermented and created entirely in house by a talented young beverage team, including Anton Tugushi, juice sommelier and coffee and tea specialist. Berries, herbs and teas are smoked and fermented to create complex juices, kombuchas and botanical infusions. “Non-alcoholic drinks usually consist of two parts. One part is the infusion, and the second part is kombucha or juice,” Demin explains. One of the drinks on the current menu, for example, is a whitecurrant kombucha, with an infusion of sencha, green tea and Hallertau hops, plus a little shio koji for umami and saltiness.
There are currently two separate infusions paired with dessert. “One consists solely of blackened celery,” Demin says. “We blacken the celery here, and I make an infusion from it, blend it, and then strain it. The second part consists of angelica root and fireweed spiced sencha – fireweed, sencha and meadowsweet. And then I sweeten all of this with a syrup made from young pine cones. This is how the blend is created.” The results are so distinctive that diners often point to the pairings as a highlight of their experience. Guests can choose between a wine pairing, directed by sommelier Duc Ngo, a juice pairing or a mixed pairing, which allows guests to experience the best of both worlds.
‘Boreal Waves’
Boreal’s menu changes constantly, dictated by the pace of nature. When a new menu is introduced, the kitchen devotes the first week fine tuning it, and then immediately begins planning the next one. The team, which includes Demin and Assistant Head Chef Dima Anatolev, maps out menus months ahead, but remain flexible. In the summer, they take a short break to travel, explore new places and gather inspiration for the upcoming season.“Spring and summer never look the same,” Demin says. “A single menu might run for 10 weeks or just four. If we sense the start and end of a season are fundamentally different, we write two separate menus instead of swapping ingredients mid-run.” This fluid approach keeps both the kitchen and the guests engaged; a diner can visit Boreal twice in a single spring and experience two entirely different menus.
When planning a menu, the kitchen team starts with the ingredients, and then considers which techniques to apply, and what experience to bring to guests. Boreal’s dedicated research and development kitchen constantly experiments with new ideas and ventures out foraging as a team. “Every dish is refined with great precision,” Demin notes. “What matters most to me is a delicate balance of flavours and a clear contrast from one course to the next.”
The result is ‘Boreal Waves’ – a seasonal menu of around 10 courses designed to take the diner through contrasts in temperature, intensity, freshness, acidity and texture. While the dishes on the menu regularly change, Demin forms each menu using this “shifting waves” structure. “It means that from course to course, the intensity changes, the temperature changes, the idea changes; some dishes are fresh and crisp, others are warm and rich,” he explains. “What matters to me is that a guest travels the full journey from the first bite to the last dessert and feels that the path has been designed, not in a straight, monotonous line, but in a wave, with a shifting spectrum of sensations.”
It is not just the menu that unfolds in waves at Boreal: the music traces the rhythm of the kitchen, changing every season, with a floaty, instrumental playlist curated by restaurant manager Iida Laiho.
The Menu: Early Spring 2026
The restaurant’s early spring menu for 2026 is an example of its ‘Boreal Waves’ approach. During the first harvests of the spring, Boreal’s team typically focuses on fresh young herbs and shoots, early vegetables and newly-harvested seaweed and mushrooms.The 2026 menu starts with a warm creamy broth, sipped straight from the cup. The broth is made from toasted shells of Norwegian shrimps and langoustines and finished with ancho chilli oil. It’s followed by organic cabbage from Sipoo (a municipality 25km east of Helsinki), with Norwegian langoustine, young cheese, lovage, chives, Sichuan pepper, dill and koji water.
Charcoal foam with trout roe from Loviisa, on Finland’s south coast, is next on the menu. Then comes cebab: sliced celeriac root marinated in mushroom miso, grilled, glazed with truffle fudge and dusted with nordic togarashi made from kombu, flaxseeds, umeboshi, cep mushrooms and timut pepper. The cebab is eaten like a kebab, with the celeriac wrapped in the leaf.
The subsequent courses are a spring salad with fresh Danish shrimps from Skagerrak, hand-peeled and served under a whole apple; a bread and fish soup with smoked butter; and then a halibut soup made from scraps of the fish, finished with bay leaf oil.
Following this, diners are treated to Norwegian halibut – fillet and fin – which has been aged with kombu to add a hit of umami, then served with roasted pumpkin with a spicy glaze made from pumpkin scraps. Next, a roasted yellow beet and pear sorbet with black beet and SCOBY jam, topped with moringa oil and bee pollen.
The menu ends with roots and poppy, made from leftover celeriac and sunchoke, roasted, caramelised and transformed into ice cream. It’s served with oat and poppy seed cake and a pine cone purée, and topped with wormwood oil and roasted sunflower seeds.
Finnish Interiors
Boreal’s interiors draw deeply from the Finnish landscape. Natural wooden tables, set simply with white napkins, glassware and low lamps, sit against dark blue walls, which mimic the surface colour of the Finnish lakes, while dark glossy tiles evoke the shifting reflections of the Northern Lights. Suspended above the dining room are amber-toned kombucha lamps, created from SCOBY (a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) grown within Boreal’s own fermentation lab. The door handles are stones, rounded by the Baltic Sea.Appropriately, the interiors are sourced locally. Most of the restaurant’s furniture was made by local workshops Verstas and Helwood, and many of its ceramics come from Finnish artist Susan Tronti, who approaches tableware as “a frame for food”. Several pieces of art complete the look, including a custom-made painting by Jaakko Mattila. Ray of Light (2025) is made with natural dyes from koji spores and yellowroot from Boreal’s kitchen, as well as Swedish saffron.
While Boreal’s food is refined, the restaurant’s vibe is nicely relaxed. There’s no formal dress code, although guests are asked to avoid strong fragrances so the room’s aromas and the menu can be experienced as intended. In addition to the main dining room, there’s also a private dining room available that accommodates 12 guests across two tables.
Changing Landscapes
Through fermentation, foraging and an unusually close relationship with producers, Demin and his team have created a dining experience at Boreal that feels both deeply contemporary and profoundly connected to the Finnish landscape. This is an exciting proposition for diners – with the restaurant in a constant state of evolution, guests can enjoy a different experience every time they visit.Related Reads:
Hero Image: Pasha Demin, chef-owner of Boreal in Helsinki, Finland. © Boreal, Helsinki
