The 2010 makeover of Tbilisi’s old town broke the hearts of many locals and preservationists, who lamented the destruction of the neighborhood’s original 19th-century buildings and the fabrication of their cinder block replicas. The quarter hadn’t seen destruction on such a scale since the Persian ruler Agha Mohammad Khan razed the city in 1795.
Instead of bemoaning the architectural tragedy, one local artist seized the opportunity to inject some positive vibrations into the precipitous hillside district by purchasing a small house underneath the 16th-century walls of the Narikala Fortress and turning it into one of Tbilisi’s coolest cafe-restaurants. Getting there, however, requires a bit of cardiovascular effort.
From Maidan Square, you must hike vertically to the end of the street and then climb 144 steps to a generous terrace at the top, where you will be greeted with feline indifference by Louie the cat (or one of his friends). Now you can catch your breath and take in the spectacular view of the capital below. Welcome to the home, café and art gallery of the radiant, red-headed Rusiko Oat, a woman who has been mixing art, food, drink and business in her living room since 2006.
“The old buildings here were spontaneously built. Very artistic, but they were terrible to live in and impossible to renovate. You had no idea what was on the other side of the wall,” Oat says. “I know the new buildings look like a decoration a bit, but they are new. Give them time,” she adds.
Art Cafe 144 Steps is more café than art, although the walls are covered in paintings by local and international painters. The laid-back aesthetics of Oat’s house is reflected in the eclectic, down-to-earth menu of the café, which caters to two types of palates. “Georgians like to eat Western food, so I have pizza, pasta and Mexican potatoes,” she says.
In a city that is 95 percent khinkali, mtsvadi and kebab, it’s good to have alternatives. 144 Steps serves up baked trout with pomegranate sauce and a respectable filet mignon in wine and mushrooms. But Oat also recognizes that foreigners prefer to eat Georgian, and in her kitchen the local dishes have that specific home cooking touch you don’t find in restaurants, because they are, in fact, cooked in her kitchen. The mtsvadi and shkmeruli will not let you down, but what you really want to order are her Megrelian (west Georgian) side dishes of gebzhalia and gupta lobio.
Gebzhalia is an exhilarating lactose-rich rush of sulguni cheese rolls swimming in a minty bath of sour cream and khacho, or cottage cheese. Sulguni, which can be rather salty, plays off the bland coolness of the creamy sauce. The secret, Oat says, is in the sulguni. “It must be soft and fresh. And it has to be made by a Megrelian,” she says with a wink.
The gupta lobio recipe comes from her grandmother’s kitchen. She insists you cannot it find anywhere but at 144 Steps, even though it’s a standard Megrelian dish. The typical recipe calls for mixing boiled red or pinto beans with a plethora of herbs and spices and rolling them into balls, but Oat’s grandmother went a step further and added crushed walnuts to the mixture and served the bean balls in bazhe sauce, which is made of fresh walnuts and seasoned with garlic and ground marigold. Served cold, garnished with a ring of onion and pomegranate seeds, gupta lobio is a healthy, comforting appetizer. You’ll want to sop up the sauce with a piece of tonis puri and wash it all down with the house Saparavi.
In summertime it’s nearly impossible to find a table after 7 p.m. without a reservation, even for a glass of wine. In the winter, when Oat and her two kids have the house pretty much to themselves again, someone will bring you a blanket if you want to hang out on the terrace and enjoy the view with a shot of chacha. This is the season when you find more friends among the clients than strangers. Oat, who has lived in a cafe for the past 11 years, admits it’s nice when things are quiet, but after three or four days she starts “feeling strange” without having people around to distract her. Her daughter, Nia, a student at the Tbilisi art academy, nods her head in agreement.
“When I’m here and everything is going on, I want to go somewhere else,” Nia says. “And when I go somewhere else, I can’t wait to come back here.”
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