As soon as we’d settled down at our table, I remembered why we’d liked this boozer so much the last time we had visited Tallinn. Delicious aromas wafting from the kitchen, reasonably priced beer and King Crimson’s Moonchild on the stereo. It was a home from home,
and given that it is a bit off the established tourist hangouts (Pikk39), the prices aree a lot more reasonable than the joints around the town square, where a pint can cost up to €5. Hell Hunt homebrewed ales come as Hele (lager) and Tume (dark ale) and at €2.90 a pint are pretty good value, there is also quite an awesome assortmant of foreign draughts, but we hadn’t come all this way to sup Newcastle Brown or Belhaven St Andrews Ale.
The other great advantage of its location is that although it is often busy, it’s rarely visited by the stag parties that plague the centre of Tallinn at the weekend, so it’s a nice relaxed place to enjoy lunch or a few drinks on a night out. The choice of music is pretty cool too: the Beatles, Who, Paul Weller, Oasis, a bit of punk, metal and prog, but never so loud that you could not enjoy a conversation.
The menu is full of interesting dishes like;
Basturma, a kind of air cured beef served with tartare sauce, salted herring or smelt, deep fried cheese, meatballs, pig’s tongue with horseradish, pickled cucumber,
fried Russian dumplings with sour cream and spicy tomato sauce and even pickled lampreys. There are filling soups, salads, pasta dishes, spicy sausages and a very decent hamburger, but the star dish for me is the crispy potatoes with mince and cheese. It’s tasty and filling, just the thing for the sub-zero temperatures outside and at under €5 you can’t knock it for a good value lunch. In fact you would be hard pressed to spend over €10 on a lunch at the Hell Hunt without some industrial scale boozing.
I particularly liked the lampshades fashioned from barbed wire.