Latvian Food In Riga Restaurants

Avoid the stag parties in the Old Town – travellers can find cheap traditional cuisine and local beer in the New City or the Ethnographic Open Air Museum by Lake Jugla.

Stag Parties in Riga Old Town

In recent years, Riga has become something of a magnet for stag parties from Britain and Ireland. Unfortunately this has led to a lot of bars and restaurants in the Art Nouveau-heavy Old Town catering for this market rather than serving traditional Latvian food and beer. Places like Dickens and Paddy Whelans offer a broad range of pub food, while other restaurants attempt watered down versions of Mexican meals, Indian curries and Chinese dishes.

Bars and restaurants in Central Riga – The New City

Riga’s Old Town is undeniably lovely, but it is worth venturing out beyond it. The new city is the real Riga – it’s gritty, in-your-face and in many ways more exciting. There are a lot of casinos and solariums on the streets beyond the old city, for example. More importantly, though, there are also bars and restaurants that serve proper Latvian food – ie. Pork, meatballs, potatoes and cabbage-heavy salads.

A fabulous example is Saturags on A Caka iela – a rustic, farmhouse-like restaurant that is deceptively cavernous, and where good, cheap traditional cuisine served on the cheap along with Latvian beers.

Latvian Ethnographic Open Air Museum

Go a bit further out (on bus route number one), though, and there’s an even more authentic option. The Latvian Ethnographic Open Air Museum is a huge forest site by Lake Jugla, filled with wooden houses and churches saved from all over the country. Walking round is a fabulous way to spend a few hours. Inside one old hay barn is a canteen-style eatery, tended by two ‘peasant’ women. A delicious, traditional Latvian feed costs next to nothing too. For example, a giant pork meatball (or ‘croquette’) with potatoes and cabbage salad cost L1.45 (less than US$3) – and that included a half litre of local beer thrown in for good measure.