Vanajanlinna Resort’s restaurant Carl Wilhelm

When the waiter at Carl Wilhelm carries over a perfectly disc-shaped red tartare steak on a large white plate, with huge, airy rice cakes alongside on their own plate like wings about to take flight, you feel like you’re inside a culinary adventure. Or a fairytale.

The restaurant’s setting in Vanajanlinna suits the mood perfectly. The name describes the manor beautifully. Set on the shore of Lake Vanajavesi, this sturdy red-brick manor has something distinctly castle-like about it. Dark, mysterious and deeply intriguing.

If you want a special experience an hour’s drive from Helsinki, Vanajanlinna Resort is just the place. For a long time, it mainly drew wedding parties and golfers (the manor’s golf course, Linna Golf, is one of Finland’s best), but now everyone else has a very good reason to come and soak up the atmosphere of Finland’s most castle-like manor.

That reason is Tuomas Vierelä. He is the head chef at restaurant Carl Wilhelm and also oversees the hotel’s restaurant operations, including breakfast, where 90 percent of the products are made in-house.

Vierelä has extensive experience in Finland’s top restaurants, including the Michelin-starred Olo, and it shows clearly at Carl Wilhelm, where we tried the four-course surprise menu (€79). Every dish was interesting and beautifully balanced. Many also had a pleasing sense of hands-on fun, with ingredients to dip and mix together yourself.

A great example was the menu’s first starter: whipped Jerusalem artichoke soup, churned butter and a cream with vendace roe. It was served with brioche sprinkled with fennel pollen (you read that right: fennel pollen). Vierelä came over himself to advise us to spread plenty of butter on the bread and dip it into the vendace roe cream. Between bites of bread, there was wonderfully rich artichoke soup to savour. Perfect!

The second starter was beef tartare, where you got to break pieces off the rice cake yourself to eat with the tartare. The main course was sinfully meaty and fatty wagyu beef (perhaps too fatty for some), and the meal ended with a seven-citrus dessert, where you could try to guess which citrus fruits had been used.

Vierelä’s skill is well illustrated by the fact that he designed the menu only shortly before dinner, after receiving excellent ingredients from producers at the last minute. This time, the surprise menu was a surprise for the waiters too.

Vierelä says his food philosophy is simple: seasonality and ingredients.

As he puts it: ‘Good ingredients make it easy to make good food.’

Vierelä’s food philosophy is clear in the way the ingredients take centre stage in each dish. Although the dishes are beautiful and inventive, the ingredients are not hidden under trickery. Everything highlights their own flavour. Vanajanlinna is well placed for this ethos, surrounded as it is by the fertile farmland of Häme.

There is also an à la carte menu, but choose the surprise menu if you can, because that is where Vierelä really gets to do what he does best. I would say the dinner I had was full Michelin level. If you don’t believe me, believe the neighbouring table, where delighted exclamations kept ringing out along the lines of: ‘I’ve got actual chills running down my spine!’

Alongside the food, the setting is enchanting too. The restaurant is in the manor’s dining room, which has been preserved in its original form. Both the chocolate manufacturer Fazer and Marshal Mannerheim have dined here when visiting the industrialist Rosenlew, who had the manor built.

Carl Wilhelm made me feel like I wanted to come back immediately, and preferably stay overnight at Vanajanlinna too. Then there would be time to visit Vanajanlinna’s golf club and try the burger Vierelä has designed for it. Vierelä said he had never made a burger before, but then spent three weeks developing one for the club.

‘It turned out really well,’ Vierelä promises.

Clearly, I’ll have to try it at some point.

Under Tuomas Vierelä’s leadership, Finland has gained a superb destination restaurant in Carl Wilhelm, one well worth travelling for, even from further afield.