Michaelson Boutique Hotel
Michaelson Boutique Hotel is located along the harbor and across a busy street from Klaipeda’s old town. The warehouse turned hotel is a quiet, comfortable and convenient place to stay. The common areas are laid out in a split level format with the bar/restaurant and reception on the bottom floor and the breakfast area a half a floor up. The hotel does a lovely job marrying the old with the new with giant old beams and contemporary art.
Rooms are reasonably spacious despite the massive beans overhead and have the usual amenities, including coffee and tea service, a safe and lots of outlets. Wifi is on the slow side.
Breakfast, an additional 15 Euros per person, includes a plentiful buffet of cold items ranging from various cured fish, baked tarts, a cheese and cold cut selection, various salads and vegetables, fruit, jam, bread, cereals and yogurt. Hot items such as eggs and crepes are available cooked to order. Coffee from a machine is brought to your table.
Dinner at the Michaelson Hotel
The tiny hotel restaurant has just three tables, maybe two more if you count the bar. Despite the size the elegant space has white table cloth draped tables, generously spaced in a contemporary setting. The menu is equally restrained with a few starters, two soups, sandwiches, risotto and 3 mains. The food, however, is well done.
We started with the gazpacho and pea soup, both simple and well executed.
For mains the salmon and asparagus risotto – perfectly done on the edge of too salty but otherwise everything you want in a risotto – and the zander fillet – beautifully cooked and served on a bed of bulgur grits (odd I know, but that’s pretty much what it was) and zucchini slices on top of pea purée. All in all a light and lovely meal.
Momo Grill
This small eatery, a café style setting with sleek white tiled walls with black grout, dark, wide-planked hard wood floors and a little too close together tables to match, cranks out quality starters and mains. Not to top the food, the host/server is a small statured character who dances between the tables, entertaining his guests with his easy smile and soft spoken manner. On a Friday night in late September we were the only English speaking patrons in the full dining room.
The short menu is heavy on the meat offering duck, lamb, veal, beef and two grilled fish options.
We started with the beef tartar (minus the quail egg as they were out) served with a basket of fresh hot fries and fried green beans garnished with dollops of garlic mayo.
For mains we tried the cod and octopus special. The well prepared cod was served on a vegetable stew topped with a mountain of fresh hot potatoes threads. The octopus was served with a beef sausage and accompanied by potatoes and grilled tomatoes, and garnished with chimichurri sauce, tiny squares of chorizo (a flavor punch) and coarsely chopped raw garlic. My only complaint of the evening was that the raw garlic pieces were too big and too intense for the dish. For dessert their heavenly house made tiramisu. Great food in a casual setting.
September 19-21, 2019
For links to all the posts in this series see the Baltics Road Trip page.