Grön

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

What Grön Is

Grön occupies a compact, dimly lit dining room of just 16 seats on Albertinkatu in central Helsinki. The room is small by design — intimate enough that the open kitchen becomes part of the experience, its young cooks adding final hand-placed touches to a procession of small, precise dishes. On busy evenings the space fills with a gentle bilingual hum, Finnish and English mixing freely, and the energy around the pass is, as the White Guide's Masters-level recognition describes it, theatrical and lively.

Executive Chef and owner Toni Kostian is the guiding force here. His philosophy is stated simply on the restaurant's own pages: what grows now determines our menu. That discipline shapes everything.

The Menu

Grön runs a set menu that shifts with four distinct seasons — Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter — and within each season two evolving iterations numbered sequentially (currently at #30). Ingredients come from Finnish and Nordic producers, the ocean, the forest, and the restaurant's own farm.

The Spring 2026 menu gives a clear sense of Kostian's register: early-season tomatoes with red currant and oregano; green asparagus with egg yolk, Västerbotten cheese and caviar; Norwegian scallop with Grön's signature XO sauce; zander with white asparagus, sorrel and a vinegar-lees hollandaise. Desserts follow the same seasonal logic — shiso sugar-cured rhubarb with elderflower sabayon, pine soft ice with spruce shoot and blueberry, a traditional Finnish spoon cookie with lilac flower marmalade.

A fully thought-through vegan menu (available by pre-order, also €168) runs in parallel, with its own solutions for every course — grilled honey turnip with vegan XO sauce, summer squash fritter with legumes "Dal", lavender ice cream. Wine pairing, a non-alcoholic pairing, and a mixed option are all available alongside.

Recognition and Atmosphere

Holding two Michelin stars and a White Guide Masters-level distinction, Grön sits at the top tier of Nordic fine dining without performing grandeur. The room is deliberately small, the kitchen open, the welcome genuine. Kostian's tribute, as he frames it himself, is to creativity, the wild, and us all — a phrase that captures the spirit of the place better than any external description could.