Latvia

Riga’s food scene was the surprise of the trip. Restaurant 3 builds its whole menu around ingredients that are wild, natural, and used without waste — no vague “farm to table” marketing, just a kitchen that means it. 3 Pavaru pushes further: Latvia only reopened to outside culinary ideas after the Soviet era ended, and the kitchen uses that freedom to experiment without old traditions holding it back.

We stayed at the Gallery Park Hotel, a 19th-century mansion built by a shipping magnate, taken over by the Soviets as a military headquarters, and handed back after Latvia’s independence in the early 1990s. The building is UNESCO-listed, so the antique furniture and embossed leather wallpaper are not a design choice — they are a requirement. It was snowing the day we arrived, and looking out at white roads and snow-capped trees from a room with a heated bathroom floor is a very specific kind of good. It sits right where the medieval old town meets the Art Nouveau district, so you get both on foot.