Rye, Sprats and Black Balsam: Eating Riga from Morning to Midnight

Latvian cooking is a northern cuisine with no interest in flattering you. It is built on rye, smoke, sour dairy and whatever the forest gives up that month, and in Riga it has quietly become one of the more interesting food stories in Europe. Eat it in order and the logic reveals itself.

Key facts

• The staple: rupjmaize, a dense dark rye sourdough that turns up at every meal and in dessert.
• The market: Riga Central Market fills five vast pavilions converted from German airship hangars, split by trade: meat, fish, dairy, produce and gastronomy.
• The season: June to September for berries, chanterelles and cold soups; spring for birch sap.
• The drink: Riga Black Balsam, a dark herbal bitters first produced in the eighteenth century and still made in the city.

Morning: bread, curd and a bacon bun

Breakfast here is savoury. Rye bread with butter, thick curd cheese, and piragi, small crescent buns stuffed with smoked bacon and onion, sold warm from bakery counters across the city for very little. Wash it down with kefir if you are committing, coffee if you are not.

Late morning: work the market pavilions

The Central Market is the single best food lesson in Latvia. In the fish hall, look for smoked eel and the tinned sprats that made the country's name as an exporter. In the dairy hall, curd, sour cream and homemade cheeses; in produce, sauerkraut sold by the ladle and, in late summer, buckets of blueberries, lingonberries and chanterelles.

Lunch: the national plate

Grey peas with bacon, pelekie zirni ar speki, is the dish Latvians will name first: earthy, salty, cooked slowly and eaten with sour milk. In summer, order auksta zupa, literally "cold soup", instead, a shockingly pink cold soup of kefir, beetroot, cucumber, dill and a halved boiled egg, served with hot potatoes on the side.

Afternoon: the sweet detour

Sklandrausis is a rye pastry case filled with carrot and potato, sweetened lightly and spiced with caraway, and it carries protected status across the EU. It tastes older than it looks. Pair it with a chocolate from Laima, the Riga confectioner whose clock in the city centre is the standard local meeting point.

Evening: the new Baltic table

Riga's contemporary restaurants have gone deep on foraging and preservation: pike-perch, smoked eel, game, birch, sea buckthorn, pickled everything. Menus change with the month, which is the point. Book ahead at weekends.

Midnight: the bitter finish

Black Balsam is 45 per cent alcohol and tastes of liquorice, bitter herbs and cough medicine in the best way. Locals cut it with blackcurrant, stir it into coffee or drop it into hot tea in winter. Latvian craft brewing is strong too, so a taproom is never far away.

Tip: Buy rye bread, curd and smoked fish at the market, then eat the lot on the canal bank in Bastejkalns park. It costs almost nothing and tastes more like Latvia than any restaurant will.