Meia Veralis was having a perfectly good evening at a medieval restaurant somewhere outside of Estonia when she saw that the servers were wearing sneakers under their dresses.

She’s careful to mention that everything else about the place was right. The atmosphere, the room, the costumes; it was obvious that someone had done their research. But she saw the sneakers. And once she saw them, she couldn’t unsee them.

Meia is a guild master at Olde Hansa, a restaurant in Tallinn’s old town that has been serving 14th-century food in a historic building for thirty years, making it one of the longest continuously running places in a quarter where most restaurants turn over every few seasons. Her “servants” aren’t allowed to carry cellphones in the leather bags they wear at the waist, on the grounds that a guest might see one. Their shoes are made in Estonia from the same leather and upward-pointed noses of the period. Most guests won’t see them under the dresses, much less stop to wonder if the leather is historically accurate. But that’s not the point.

I ate there in January of last year, at the end of a trip that had gone badly enough that I almost didn’t go at all.

We came to Estonia for a conference in Tartu, and somewhere over Sweden, on the connecting flight, I lost my passport. What followed was three days of phone calls, long bus rides and the particular exhaustion of being passportless. By the time the Swedish airport confirmed they’d found it, I’d stopped caring about anything except getting home. My husband reminded me that we might never be here again, so I pulled myself out of the room and headed for old Tallinn.

Stepping into Olde Hansa is the closest you can get to stepping into the 14th century, and one of the first things you’ll notice is that the room is lit entirely by candles. “Candlelight opens a door to be more in this present moment,” Meia mentions. I took four or five pictures, but my phone’s camera was no match for the dim light, so I put it away. There are no cellphones in the 14th century, I thought to myself. How about living a moment for once.

Once my eyes adjusted, everything else unravelled: the smell of the spices, the noise of a busy dining room, and the woman in full costume coming toward our table.

The servants welcome and serve you in full character. They’re also, actually, called servants. That’s the title they hold for a year and a day. Then they’ll upgrade to journeyman, just as it was in the guilds four hundred years ago. Theatre isn’t a layer applied over the restaurant. It’s the job. Which leaves you sitting at the table wondering where you find the kind of people who are willing to do this.

Meia gives me some insight. They screen candidates with a personality test that measures different traits like influence and conscientiousness. The people who end up on the floor at Olde Hansa have several similarities. “They’re warm by nature,” she tells me. “They’re open and expressive, so it’s easier for them to give that kind of service because it’s not learned; it’s part of who they are at core.”

You can teach anyone about the 14th century, but you can’t teach them to happily hold character for eight hours. So Olde Hansa majors on the parts that can’t be trained and works on the rest. Each new servant has their own mentor, who prepares them for an exam that covers the full menu and service in four languages: Estonian, Finnish, English and Russian. For many in Estonia, restaurant service is work people do for a few years on the way to something else. Olde Hansa has servants who have been on the floor for fifteen to twenty years, and others who left for other jobs and came back.

I’m realizing that this is likely due to their standards, which extend far beyond the menu. Olde Hansa publishes its virtues, which is not something restaurants usually do. When I asked what justice looks like in practice, she answered without hesitating. “We value every guest the same way. There are no exceptions,” she says. “Are you a solo traveller, a family with kids, a large group? Everyone is a welcome guest in a rich merchant’s house.”

• • •

This summer, one of the guild masters is in Paris looking at cloth.

A Party City costume would work anywhere else, except here. The challenge isn’t the sewing or the design, though both take months. It’s trying to find the perfect material, and the selection in Estonia doesn’t have an accurate option. So the team is off on a plane to one of the fashion capitals of the world, hunting for the same textile they would have used in medieval times.

The same care goes into everything on the table. The plates are hand-painted by an Estonian ceramicist, no two the same, and the clay holds heat longer than anything a restaurant would normally buy.

My husband, who tries everything, ordered the bear. Yes, bear.

The dish is slow-cooked for ten hours in a savoury sauce, the work of Emmanuel Wille, the chef who has run this kitchen’s interpretation of medieval recipes for years. There are no potatoes or tomatoes on the menu. In the 14th century, neither of them had reached Europe yet. But there’s spice: cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, black pepper, saffron and cloves, the flavours a wealthy Hanseatic merchant could get his hands on, thanks to Tallinn sitting on the trade route that carried them.

The obsession with detail isn’t only thoughtful; it’s good business. Olde Hansa seats three hundred, and last year that stopped being enough. When I visited, one of the rooms was a shop, full of the cups and plates you’d been drinking and eating from all night. That room is now full of tables, so that they can welcome more guests.

• • •

While on holiday in Greece with her family, Meia fell into conversation with a Portuguese couple. When they heard she was Estonian, they quickly went on to tell her about a night in Tallinn seven years earlier, at a medieval restaurant in the old town. She asked what they ate. “Nothing,” they said. They had one mug of beer. But they went on and on about how special it was, not knowing they were speaking to a guild master of the rich merchant’s house herself. And I’m sure she felt so proud.

Whatever stayed with them that night wasn’t the food. They only had a beer. But what still has them telling the story is the weight of several hundred small decisions they never consciously noticed, made by people who assumed that they probably wouldn’t.

Which has changed what I look for when I travel. Not only whether a place is beautiful, popular or picture-worthy, but whether the people behind it believe you’re owed the whole experience, even the parts you’ll never notice.