HELLsinki?
A typical scene in a Helsinki restaurant during the prohibition era looked superficially serene. Customers would sit at their tables sipping cup after cup of tea. The tables also had bowls of crisp bread which nobody ate. Whenever a customer would leave the restaurant, the bread would be moved to another table, where the customers also ignored it.
No, the people of Helsinki at the time were not so fond of tea that they would have bothered to go to a restaurant and drink nothing else. The cups contained what was known as “hard tea” - half tea, half pure alcohol.
The crisp bread was a bluff, used to ward off the sobriety monitors, or “breath sniffers”.
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