Arctic Restaurant — Restaurant in Rovaniemi sub-region

In my view, recommended only for European-looking people. We are Latin-Asian couple. A waiter made us wait for 5 minutes to take a seat, and another 30 minutes to order despite the place being below 20% occupancy. He didn't respond when I raised my hand. We needed to ask twice for water. Meanwhile, the waiter was enjoying friendly conversation with a Dutch couple, and a Finnish couple was served very quickly to the level they finished their dinner earlier than we did even though they came after us.

Another waiter lectured us on how to tip because “that’s how it's done in Finland”, apparently unaware of the fact that as Finnish Permanent Residents, we know that tipping is not practiced in this country.

They might or might not be racists but definitely they do some sort of profiling that has nothing to do with restaurant business. They treated a western guy as badly as us and we noticed he was in casual outfit with a backpack. No mention anywhere of dress code or other requirements. So, in our conclusion, customers are treated differently depending on appearance.

Those 2 waiters are hurting the business. If this restaurant wants to play high-class for an exclusive customer type, put a label at the entrance door (e.g. “blondes in Tux only”), to save others like us the disgusting experience. Alternatively, management could consider training staff on the fact that world has changed, demographics included.

Being fair, the food was not bad, just appetizer-sized for the price.

In contrast, Nili restaurant next to them is much more popular, with absolutely greater food and...

I had a positive first impression because they did their best to try and accommodate us even though we showed up early for our reservation. It was unfortunately not possible, but they were really nice about it.

We opted for their signature 3 course menu. They also offer menus with 4 and 5 courses, as well as a la carte. I wanted to replace the dessert with something else and was informed it wasn’t possible (understandable), but ordering the dishes individually was only 5 euro more, so that’s what I did.

The menu starts with salmon pastrami and crunch veggies with wasabi mustard served on what looks like a scallop shell. Beautiful presentation and nice flavor.

For the main course we had the reindeer and moose with root vegetables. I would have liked a little bit more reindeer meat (it was only a couple of small strips), and there was too much sauce in my opinion. It was my first time tasting reindeer and I quite enjoyed it. The stewed moose with duck fat was delicious, and so were the veggies. For this dish we went with the recommended wine (2πR, a Spanish wine) and it was lovely.

My dessert was crème brûlée with blueberry ice cream, which I loved. I have a weird bias towards crème brûlée so don’t take my word for it too much 😂 My wife had the arctic signature dessert, which I can best describe as fluffy and cute.

We were satisfied with service and felt that we paid an ok price for what we got, considering it’s more of a...

Nice looking restaurant. Service was incredibly fast, we were in and out in 35 mins for dinner which is wild.

Unfortunately we both had the sauteed reindeer for dinner (having had reindeer steak the night before and keen to have more Lapish food). This was a mistake. It is essentially inedible, i can't believe anything is deliberately made that salty. Sauteed reindeer is like having mince and tatties (potatoes) but with kebab meat instead of mince and half a shaker of salt poured on top. I'm scottish so am used to this type of food, but couldn't get through it. The mash was deliciously creamy and the berries pair well but aren't enough to cut through the salt on the meat. Considering the low quality of the meat being served on this dish, it's incredibly over priced, the reindeer sirloin I had the night before was only slightly more.

The home made bread and butter was great. I think the rest of the food is probably great, I feel like the restaurant is probably good, but given we both ate the same thing and it was horrendous, I couldn't really recommend the place.

Thanks for reply. Yes we did tell the waiter and were told it's supposed to be a salty dish. Maybe it was...