Restaurant Pömilä, a member of the Arctic Food Lab network, is a restaurant located in Tyrnävä (Meijerikatu 2) offering lunch and café services as well as catering. Pömilä is run by Restaurant Manager and CEO Marika Keränen.

Pömilä’s core operations are its home-style lunch and café, both open on weekdays. The restaurant is generally open from Monday to Thursday from 7:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., and on Fridays from 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

In the evenings and on weekends, Pömilä focuses on catering services. A wide range of private events are hosted on the premises—from “kitten christenings to actual christenings”—and for larger occasions, catering is provided at the customer’s chosen venue.

Local food plays a central role in Pömilä’s operations. On the restaurant’s own half-hectare cultivation area, all basic vegetables and herbs are grown, along with many others ranging from eggplants to peppers. During the winter season, all onions, red onions, potatoes, and grain products used by the restaurant come from Tyrnävä.

In addition to farming, Keränen is an active fisher and mushroom forager. Pömilä occasionally hosts local food days, during which the menu may feature, for example, fish dishes made from fish caught within a ten-kilometre radius. Mushroom dishes are among Pömilä’s most beloved offerings. The menu also includes traditional Oulu-region dishes, such as rössypottu (a traditional stew made with blood dumplings).

Pömilä is also engaged in community support work, offering training placements for students in work-based learning, vocational school trainees, and people with intellectual disabilities, as well as providing food assistance, for example, to bereaved families. In 2018, Keränen was awarded the Arjen turvaaja (“Everyday Hero”) prize by the Municipal Sector Development Foundation.

The cooperative store began operating a café and food business in 1919 in premises rented from the cooperative dairy. Between 1949 and 1958, the facilities also housed a bakery. Pömilä has likely been a commonly used name for the café in general. The Finnish verb pömiseminen means chatting or socializing, and farmers would gather at Pömilä while waiting for empty milk churns from the dairy, for example. The Municipality of Tyrnävä purchased the building in 1987, and it was fully renovated in 2006.

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