Cafe Regatta

This guide to Cafe Regatta in Helsinki starts with the ugliest structure ever built on a fine lakeside property, a rough timber shed Gustav and Bertha Paulig, of the coffee dynasty, put up in eighteen eighty-seven to dry wet fishing nets. It follows the shed's quiet decades of storage, the postwar joke of pouring coffee from it after the nineteen fifty-two Olympics filled the rowing stadium next door, and its formal opening as a café in two thousand two under Raine Korpela and his daughters. You'll hear why the walls are still rough log and the roof still steeply sloped. Grab a spot by the fire pit and roast a sausage on a stick while you listen.