Olive Oil Trading Co.
Restaurants
By Howard Jarvis.
16.04.2014
Each year we take pleasure in sampling a few spring menus at the city’s best restaurants. One of the most unusual and pleasantly surprising so far this year has been Olive Oil Trading Co.
Olive Oil is an Italian ristorante located in a quiet corner of Old Riga opposite Riga Castle. Once the outdoor terraces are in place it’ll be a little less quiet but the food will surely be just as authentic and delicious.
Here we recommend the “chef’s special offer” menu of five or six dishes, which change every few days. On the evening we visited we jumped at the chance to order Brasato al Barolo (€15), fabulously tender slices of the finest Latvian beefsteak marinated Piedmont-style for four or five days in a full-bodied tannic red wine and served with vegetables – in our case a pile of equally soft butter-fried green beans – and doused in a demi-glace sauce. It’s a classic dish of the wine-rich Piedmont region, but you can experience the real thing in Riga too.
While that was being rustled up in the kitchen, we asked for a round of arancinetti, or risotto balls (€7.50). Shaped more like cones, there are three specific flavors – blue cheese, served with a dip-like pot of cranberry sauce, shrimp with a pot of anchovy sauce, and mushroom with yoghurt.
Blue cheese is not for everyone, but for us it won hands down. The breadcrumb-coated balls, a traditional Sicilian dish, were crumbly and slightly starchy as in a typical risotto, and wonderfully cheesy.
We also enjoyed a center-table plate of bresaola (€8.80), wafer-thin cuts of air-dried salted raw meat drizzled in virgin olive oil. When we outwardly expressed our personal passion for quality olive oil, the restaurant treated us to a tiny glass of “extra virgin superiore organic olive oil”, especially brought from a farm in Sicily, to sip like wine. It had a delightful light aroma and no hint of a bitter aftertaste.
Finally we ordered almond parfait with chocolate sauce and lingonberries (€3.50), which tasted as spectacularly as it looked with rich dark chocolate oozing over the creamy parfait and sprinkled with the super-healthy Nordic red berries.
We wish we could give this review more space as there’s far more to the menus at Olive Oil Trading Co. than we can mention – the best bruschetta in the Baltics, cioppino seafood soup, a super spread of main dishes… We can only urge you to go there.
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