Tbilisi

Tbilisi’s Best Wine Bars

Georgia’s astounding winemaking tradition traces back eight millennia, and is not to be missed. From the country’s different varieties, terroirs, and winemaking methods, there’s a lot to learn – and taste – when it comes to Georgian wine. As a starting point (or simply for those who don’t have time to venture out of the city), Tbilisi’s wine bars are a great place to have a glass or two and dig into Georgian viticulture. Wine bars are a relatively new trend in Georgia and about the greatest thing to happen since the invention of the kvevri, the characteristic ceramic vessels for fermenting and storing traditional Georgian wine.

Tbilisi

Azarphesha: A Sanctuary for the Living Arts

Up above Freedom Square where the Sololaki and Mtatsminda neighborhoods blend together, there is a 100-year-old building with an apartment five steps below the sidewalk. It’s a warm, intimate space, part living room, part museum. A massive collection of wine glasses hang from the ceiling, 19th-century framed portraits of Georgians decorate one wall above a piano, while opposite are glass cases displaying antique ceramic pitchers and elegant, polished drinking horns called kantsi. There are also two vintage silver vessels – exquisite ashtray-sized pans with long stylized handles used in days of old for drinking wine to special toasts. This cup is called an azarphesha, and this entire collection (and the walls containing it) belong to Luarsab Togonidze, a folklorist, author, entrepreneur and co-owner of this welcoming restaurant, also called Azarphesha.

Tbilisi

Au Blé d’or: Grain of Truth

Someone once said that humanitarian workers are like mercenaries, missionaries or madmen. It is a description we have also applied to expats who end up in far-flung places like Georgia. Like the foreigner out in the secluded Kakhetian village of Argokhi, between the Alazani River and the Caucasus Mountains, who has forged his life growing a nearly extinct variety of native wheat and baking it into bread; but he is no madman. He’s a Frenchman. We had first heard about Jean-Jacques Jacob some years ago while visiting the Alaverdi Monastery in Kakheti, when a friend pointed north of the giant cathedral and told us of a Frenchman who had started a farm in the middle of nowhere.

Tbilisi

Liquid Assets: Borjomi Mineral Water, Georgia’s Iconic Elixir

It was a scorcher of a summer day in 2002, and we were pushing our broken Russian motorcycle and sidecar through crowded Plekhanov streets with a gnarly case of cotton mouth. Dripping in sweat, we limped up to the kiosk by our building and slipped some coins to the lovely Irma for a lifesaving cold bottle of Borjomi mineral water. She reached into her little fridge and passed a bottle to our trembling hands. We twisted it open, took a deep three-gulp pull and grabbed our neck in a panic, alcoholic vapors steaming from every pore of our body. Gasping, we handed the bottle back to her. “This is not Borjomi,” we wheezed. She sniffed it and jumped back. “Oh sorry. That is my husband’s spiritus,” she explained, replacing it deep into the fridge with a real bottle after checking it first.

Tbilisi

Tartan: Take-Out Wizards

You are motionless, stuck in a traffic jam after a long day at work while your stomach growls. You know the rest of the family will be hungry when you get home and that the fridge is empty and sad. Shopping and cooking is out of the question, so you turn onto a Vera side street, zig-zag through one-way lanes to Tatishvili Street, double park, and run into a tiny gastronomic oasis that has been saving lives like yours for nearly a decade. Its name is Tartan. Located in a step-down ground-floor apartment, takeout cafeterias don’t get homier than this. The front room is taken up with a long counter of refrigerated display cases half filled with enough ready-made dishes to lay down a feast when you get home.

Tbilisi

Spring in Tbilisi: Tarragon, a Love Story

At the cusp of winter’s end, men across Georgia balance on wobbly ladders and trim their grapevines. The clippings will be used later for baking bread in traditional tone ovens and for roasting mtsvadi, skewered chunks of pork, on the embers. Only after the trimming is completed throughout the land is springtime allowed to arrive. And when it comes, it does so in teasing bursts of bold flavors, juicy colors and luscious aromas. The first indication of spring is the arrival of tarkhuna – tarragon – at the central bazaar, where we love to shop for produce.

Tbilisi

Bina 37: Wine Cellar in the Sky

We are on the eighth floor terrace of a relatively new apartment building in the Vedzisi neighborhood, nodding our heads with joker grins like gawkers at a freak show. The view is as spectacular as they come in mountainy Tbilisi, but that’s not what we’re chuckling at. There are 43 ceramic urns – kvevri – buried almost a meter and a half into a bed of sand and perlite in what was supposed to be a swimming pool for a nine-year-old boy. But in an epiphanic moment, the child’s father, 43-year-old doctor, Zura Natroshvili, decided to build a marani in the sky instead. The father of modern advertising, David Ogilvy, once said, “The best ideas come as jokes.” Dr. Natroshvili would probably agree. His friends thought he needed psychiatric help when he first shared his idea.

Tbilisi

Bina 37: Wine Cellar in the Sky

We are on the eighth floor terrace of a relatively new apartment building in the Vedzisi neighborhood, nodding our heads with joker grins like gawkers at a freak show. The view is as spectacular as they come in mountainy Tbilisi, but that’s not what we’re chuckling at. There are 43 ceramic urns – kvevri – buried almost a meter and a half into a bed of sand and perlite in what was supposed to be a swimming pool for a nine-year-old boy. But in an epiphanic moment, the child’s father, 43-year-old doctor, Zura Natroshvili, decided to build a marani in the sky instead. The father of modern advertising, David Ogilvy, once said, “The best ideas come as jokes.” Dr. Natroshvili would probably agree. His friends thought he needed psychiatric help when he first shared his idea.

Tbilisi

Salobie: Back to Beans

We met Tega at a friend’s dinner table shortly after moving to Tbilisi in 2002. Tall, debonair, with dark puppy eyes and an ever-present Colgate smile, Tega made it a point from that first meeting to take us under his wing and introduce us to the best Tbilisi had to offer. That was how we first ended up at Salobie, near the ancient capital of Mtskheta. “This place is famous for its beans,” he said. “And its name is Beans!” he chortled (lobio means “beans” in Georgian, and salobie is “house of beans”). The restaurant felt like something between a museum and a summer mountain resort. We were in the original dining room, built next to a giant 300-year-old wooden house from Racha.

Tbilisi

Sulico Wine Bar: Soul Cellar

Happiness comes in all forms, but according to Aristotle’s scale there are four distinct levels to this particular emotion – say, for example, waking up to a glorious sunny day (laetus), getting a special discount from your local green grocer (felix) or watching your dog do its business in a sinister neighbor’s yard (beatitudo). Looking out the window, the snow-capped Caucasus along the horizon on this bright day, our eyes scan the city and settle over our own neighborhood of Vera, below. We sigh a sensual “yes” and nod smugly with our arms crossed because now there is a place in the hood where we can experience each of Aristotle’s levels of happiness in one splendid sitting.

Tbilisi

Tartan: Take-Out Wizards

You are motionless, stuck in a traffic jam after a long day at work while your stomach growls. You know the rest of the family will be hungry when you get home and that the fridge is empty and sad. Shopping and cooking is out of the question, so you turn onto a Vera side street, zig-zag through one-way lanes to Tatishvili Street, double park, and run into a tiny gastronomic oasis that has been saving lives like yours for nearly a decade. Its name is Tartan. Located in a step-down ground-floor apartment, takeout cafeterias don’t get homier than this. The front room is taken up with a long counter of refrigerated display cases half filled with enough ready-made dishes to lay down a feast when you get home.

Tbilisi

Liquid Assets: Lagidze Water, Georgian Nectar

It was our first Tbilisi summer stroll down the city’s main drag, Rustaveli Avenue; two sweaty, newly arrived pie-eyed tourists tripping on the 2001 reality. There were billboards advertising the recent kidnapping of a Lebanese businessman, policemen in crumpled gray uniforms extorting money from random motorists with a wag of their batons, and at the top of the street, a former luxury hotel looking like a vertical shanty was full of displaced Georgians from Abkhazia. Parched and cotton-mouthed, we entered a café of sorts for cool respite. The room had high ceilings, was stark and all marble-tiled, including the long, wide bar. A splendid social-realism mosaic of women, grapes and wine was laid into the back wall. The counter was decorated with a few tin ashtrays and a spinning rack holding several tall cone-shaped beakers filled with technicolored syrups.

Tbilisi

Armazis Kheoba: Down by the River

Editor’s note: It’s Beat the Heat Week at Culinary Backstreets, and in this week’s stories, we’re sharing some of our favorite spots to visit when the summer temperatures soar. Summer in Tbilisi means sweet and sour cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, fresh figs, watermelons and, most importantly, tomatoes that taste the way God intended them to. It’s a season bursting with flavors – but there’s a hitch. Tbilisi summers are oppressively hot and humid, the thick, gritty city air leaves a mucky film on the roof of your mouth, stifling your appetite and keeping you out of your favorite local eateries. Everyone evacuates the capital in the summer, and if we can’t manage to get out of town for weeks on end, we can at least drive 15 minutes to spend an afternoon at Armazis Kheoba for some lungfuls of fresh air and beef liver mtsvadi.

Tbilisi

Armazis Kheoba: Down by the River

Editor’s note: It’s Beat the Heat Week at Culinary Backstreets, and in this week’s stories, we’re sharing some of our favorite spots to visit when the summer temperatures soar. Summer in Tbilisi means sweet and sour cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, fresh figs, watermelons and, most importantly, tomatoes that taste the way God intended them to. It’s a season bursting with flavors – but there’s a hitch. Tbilisi summers are oppressively hot and humid, the thick, gritty city air leaves a mucky film on the roof of your mouth, stifling your appetite and keeping you out of your favorite local eateries. Everyone evacuates the capital in the summer, and if we can’t manage to get out of town for weeks on end, we can at least drive 15 minutes to spend an afternoon at Armazis Kheoba for some lungfuls of fresh air and beef liver mtsvadi.

Tbilisi

Retro: Maestro of Khachapuri

There was a dowdy little joint in Batumi, Georgia’s Black Sea port town, where two middle-aged women churned out the most exquisite Adjarian-style khachapuri pies in an old pizza oven. It was a must-stop for every trip to the coast, as there were few places in Tbilisi that could scorch such an authentic acharuli. As the years passed, the seedy potholed streets that hosted a pool hall, brothels and our favorite khachapuri joint transformed into a gentrified neighborhood of gift shops and boutiques catering to the ever-growing number of tourists flocking to Batumi. Meanwhile, the boat-shaped acharuli has become one of the most emblematic dishes of Georgian cuisine and is not only found all over Tbilisi, but is also being served in New York and Washington, DC.

Tbilisi

Dukani Racha: Tbilisi’s Oldest Greasy Spoon

We returned to Tbilisi in 2002 with the intention of staying one year. On that first day back, our friends took us to a chummy brick-walled cellar in Sololaki. There was enough sunlight coming down through the door to illume low pine tables and seating for fifty people max. In a refrigerated counter, menu items were displayed: beef tongue, tomato and cucumber salad, assorted cheeses, badrijani (sliced fried eggplant stuffed with a garlicky walnut paste), all the standard stuff. It was a Georgian greasy spoon, for sure, with a kitchen that would make a health inspector shudder, but the khinkali were really good, and the house wine was as decent as it comes. The name of the place was Dukani Racha. Little did we know people had been coming here for decades.

Tbilisi

Spring Surprises: Wild Greens in Tbilisi

Out here in Garikula, our slice of heaven an hour west of Tbilisi, spring is peaking. It started with the plum blossoms and now the apple, pear and cherry blossoms are popping, painting the countryside in patches of white and pink. Walking along a village path with our neighbor Shota, he suddenly stops, bends down and reaches into a wad of weeds and pulls. “Ah-ha,” he says showing us a little bundle of wild asparagus, skinny, green and an appetizing revelation when cooked just right. Back in Tbilisi, this asparagus appeared in the central bazaar a couple weeks ago, along with other welcomed indications that springtime has finally arrived.

Tbilisi

Kikliko: For Whom The Rooster Crows

The Georgian culinary experience is all about the dinner, stereotypically a glutton’s nirvana of singularly delicious foods stacked plate by plate to the ceiling alongside beer pitchers full of wine. This might explain why, after a night of belt-popping gourmandizing, there is very little in the way of a breakfast culture in Tbilisi. Another explanation might be that Tbiliseli are not morning people. Most cafes open around 11 a.m., which is about the time our neighborhood baker is slapping his first batch of bread in the tone. Nevertheless, people do break the fast at home, often with leftover bread and butter or a chunk of cheese, or maybe day-old khachapuri.

Tbilisi

Maspindzelo: Hangover Helper

We spent our first few years in Georgia in a whirlwind of overindulgence, hostages to the unforgiving hospitality of friends and acquaintances. Try as they might to convince us that their wine and chacha were so “clean” we would not get hangovers, there were plenty of mornings when the insides of our skulls felt like 60-grain sandpaper and our tongues like welcome mats for packs of wet street mongrels. We would hobble out of bed and stumble to the fridge and, if lucky, find two of Georgia’s most recognized hangover remedies: Borjomi mineral water and matzoni, Georgian yogurt.

Tbilisi

CB on the Road: The Batumi Fish Market, A Sole Survivor

In 2013, Anthony Bourdain and the Parts Unknown team arrived in Batumi, the capital of Adjara, to shoot the first segment of their Georgian adventure. The show’s producers invited Zamir Gotta, a Russian sidekick unfamiliar with the city, to join him. They visited a casino, strip club and mediocre restaurant for khashi, tripe soup, which failed to impress Bourdain. When the episode aired, local social media users flamed with disappointment over the Batumi portion in particular: “Casinos and strip clubs! That’s not Batumi!” While they aren’t the places we would have taken Anthony Bourdain, they are most certainly Batumi, along with the rainy summers and stifling subtropic air, the new five-star hotels and crumbling Khrushchyovkas (Soviet apartment buildings), a McDonald’s housed in an award-winning modern structure and a chacha-spouting fountain that dried up shortly after it was built in 2012.

Tbilisi

Sulico Wine Bar: Soul Cellar

Happiness comes in all forms, but according to Aristotle’s scale there are four distinct levels to this particular emotion – say, for example, waking up to a glorious sunny day (laetus), getting a special discount from your local green grocer (felix) or watching your dog do its business in a sinister neighbor’s yard (beatitudo). Looking out the window, the snow-capped Caucasus along the horizon on this bright day, our eyes scan the city and settle over our own neighborhood of Vera, below. We sigh a sensual “yes” and nod smugly with our arms crossed because now there is a place in the hood where we can experience each of Aristotle’s levels of happiness in one splendid sitting.

Tbilisi

Guga Kotetishvili: Tbilisi’s Wizard of Comfort

There was a large table made from a huge buzzsaw blade, covered in Russian and Western photo magazines. A greasy boombox played jazz, blues and classic rock cassettes. Behind the high wooden counter was a somber, dark-haired young woman who served semi-cold Argo beer for 3 lari a bottle and a simple lunch for a few lari more. We had found our watering hole. Apollo had been designed by local artist Guga Kotetishvili, a name we wouldn’t know until 2004, when he helped two young Apollo regulars auspiciously launch an entrepreneurial gastro-dominion with the opening of Cafe Kala on Erekle II Street, a narrow, 100-meter lane in Old Town. Back then, there was nothing else on the street.

Tbilisi

Salobie Bia: Simple Pleasures

This story starts with a hamburger, a juicy, perfectly grilled patty between a pair of fresh, no-frill homemade buns and the standard trimmings. As burgers become part of the culinary landscape in Tbilisi, we find that many cooks have a tendency to get too slick with a dish that loathes pretension. But this place, Burger House, nailed the balance between originality and straightforwardness. While sopping the drippings up with finger-thick fries we saw a hamburger story in the making and filed the idea away in our bucket list of food tales. A year or so later, walking down Machebeli Street in Sololaki, we saw a little basement joint named Salobie Bia with a Gault & Millau (a French restaurant guide) sign above the door and decided to investigate further. Several lip-smacking meals later, we learned that the chef and co-owner of this place is the same guy who was responsible for those impressive burgers.

Tbilisi

Tartan: Take-Out Wizards

You are motionless, stuck in a traffic jam after a long day at work while your stomach growls. You know the rest of the family will be hungry when you get home and that the fridge is empty and sad. Shopping and cooking is out of the question, so you turn onto a Vera side street, zig-zag through one-way lanes to Tatishvili Street, double park, and run into a tiny gastronomic oasis that has been saving lives like yours for nearly a decade. Its name is Tartan. Located in a step-down ground-floor apartment, takeout cafeterias don’t get homier than this. The front room is taken up with a long counter of refrigerated display cases half filled with enough ready-made dishes to lay down a feast when you get home.

Tbilisi

Liquid Assets: Lagidze Water, Georgian Nectar

It was our first Tbilisi summer stroll down the city’s main drag, Rustaveli Avenue; two sweaty, newly arrived pie-eyed tourists tripping on the 2001 reality. There were billboards advertising the recent kidnapping of a Lebanese businessman, policemen in crumpled gray uniforms extorting money from random motorists with a wag of their batons, and at the top of the street, a former luxury hotel looking like a vertical shanty was full of displaced Georgians from Abkhazia. Parched and cotton-mouthed, we entered a café of sorts for cool respite. The room had high ceilings, was stark and all marble-tiled, including the long, wide bar. A splendid social-realism mosaic of women, grapes and wine was laid into the back wall. The counter was decorated with a few tin ashtrays and a spinning rack holding several tall cone-shaped beakers filled with technicolored syrups.

Tbilisi

Market Recovery: Tbilisi’s Deserter’s Bazaar, One Year into the Pandemic

We used to live across the street from Dinamo Stadium, on the edge of the Deserter’s Bazaar and part of the Vagzalis Bazroba – Station Bazaar – complex, a sprawling, unhinged confederacy of free-marketers selling everything from counterfeit apparel to contraband from Russia, secondhand cell phones and coffee beans labeled Nescafé. Zaza, a musician and our roommate at the time, served as our guide. His song “Vashlis Gamyidvelo,” about an apple seller who sold him a beautiful but rotten apple, was a big hit on the radio and made him quite the local celebrity. Shopping with Zaza at the bazaar meant lots of discounts and free drinks at the many wine stands back then.

Tbilisi

Mukhrani Nursery: Georgia’s Graft Masters

In March, as the teasing wafts of spring begin to fill the air, local farmers converge at the entrance of the Sunday bazaar in Garikula where they lean against their old jalopies with bundled fruit tree saplings and grapevine seedlings for sale. For someone who wants to start a little backyard vineyard with a handful of vines, the bazaar is a fine place to shop. More ambitious wine growers, however, need to go to a grafting nursery and place an order. In Shida Kartli, one of the largest is run by a family who has been nursing grapevines for generations. Kobe Cherqezishvili, his wife, Maia Dalakishvili, and their sons, Beso and Gio, tend to over 500 varieties at their seven-hectare nursery in Mukhrani, which they opened in 2004.

Tbilisi

Sping (Food) Break 2021: Tkemali, Powered by Plums

There is a day in February when we raise our noses to the sky like dogs and catch the first teasing wisps of spring. Our eyes widen, we nod and chime with giddy grins, “It’s coming.” Then the weather turns with a cold snap or even snow and we forget all about spring until one day in mid-March we wake up, pour a coffee, peer out the window and cry out, “Whoa, look!” jabbing our forefingers towards our tkemali tree and its little white flowers that bloomed overnight; the first blossoms of the year. No fruit says springtime greater than tkemali, which is a cherry plum (prunus cerasifera) harvested young, when it is exquisitely sour. Together with fresh tarragon, it is the basis of the mandatory Easter dish, chakapuli. People are stocked with preserved sour plums just in case Easter falls too early on the calendar.

Tbilisi

Recipe: Shkmeruli, a Georgian Garlic Bomb

When our friend applied for a chef gig at the cooking department of a northern California community college, a board of evaluators gave him a pair of chicken breasts, a frugal selection of ingredients and said, “Create something.” He assessed his workspace and smiled. He saw white wine, chicken stock, butter, shallots and plenty of garlic. He dusted the breasts in flour and hocus-pocus, finished off the dish with a five-fingered pinch of chopped parsley and got the job. Garlic chicken works. Its humble transcendence has conquered the world over – and the more garlic, the merrier. In provincial France they roast a chicken with no less than 40 cloves of garlic for poulet aux 40 gousses d’ail, while Oaxacans make pollo oaxaqueño con orégano y ajo with 30 cloves.

Tbilisi

Bagelin: Conjuring Bagels in Tbilisi

Being an expat means learning to live without a lot of comforts that we ordinarily take for granted back home – things like bagels, ripe Haas avocados, extra-dry Martinis, corn tortillas and enforced traffic laws. Sometimes we meet people who have a hard time adjusting to a life without Pop-Tarts and spend their leisure time whining about everything that’s not like home. Other times you meet a person like Andrew Moffatt. A physicist by education, Andy was crunching numbers as a bank analyst in his native Australia when it dawned on him that there was a hell of a lot more to life than making PowerPoint presentations and status reports. He turned his back on the safe and predictable career and spent the next four years traveling the world, picking up cooking tips along the way.

Tbilisi

Coronavirus Diary: Life in Tbilisi, One Year On

It has been 12 months since the novel coronavirus was first detected in Georgia. It was about the same time two CB colleagues, Celia from Lisbon and Chiara from Naples, arrived for a brief visit and joined us for what would be one of our last food walks of the year. Later, we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Aristeaus, where four guys at a table casually sipping wine broke out into goose-bump-inducing polyphony while we dined near the fireplace on shkmeruli, kupati, dambalkhacho and a bottle of fine rkatsiteli. As dinner memories go, this ranks highly not only for its serendipitous brilliance, but also because it would be the last time we would ever eat there – the restaurant closed for good in late 2020.

Tbilisi

Elvis: Tbilisi’s Delivery Scene, All Shook Up

Having food delivered used to feel like a very decadent thing to do in Tbilisi. Probably because our neighbors, who tend to be ever judging, would scurry to their windows at the sound of a full throttle motor scooter bouncing up our cobblestone lane. “What’s that they’re doing?” we could imagine them mumbling, watching us walk out as if we’re making a drug deal, self-conscious and counting out money only to hurry back home with a couple of pizza boxes. Nobody had meals delivered in Georgia. It didn’t take long, however, to get over our insecurity. When a takeout sushi joint opened a few blocks away, we called them to deliver instead of making the five-minute walk to fetch the maki rolls, simply because we could.

Tbilisi

Mama Terra: Detox, With a Mexican Twist

Anthony Bourdain liked to say the body is a playground, a sentiment we couldn’t agree with more, especially when digging into the cholesterol-laden acharuli khachapuri or wiping a ketsi clean of its spicy pool of kupati – Georgian sausage – grease with a piece of bread. Shots of chacha and glasses of wine make us swing, bounce, teeter-totter and sometimes fall, and in the morning when the fog and pain clears, we may remember that the body is also a fragile temple requiring more ministration than a sacrificial bowl of tripe soup can provide. In Tbilisi’s Mtatsminda district there is a sanctuary providing both solace to devotees of healthy eating and penance to gluttonous sinners like us. No ordinary hummus bar, this affectionate “eating apartment” is called Mama Terra – Veggie Corner.

Tbilisi

I Will Survive: A Tbilisi Chef Hustles to Stay Open

For us, the neighborhood of Mtatsminda has long been associated with the sour smell of tear gas. When riots broke out over a stolen election in 2007, we found ourselves on a Mtatsminda side street, between a line of riot police below and protesters armed with bricks above – a very dumb place to be. A cop aimed his tear-gas gun at us and shot. We ducked behind a car and the canister broke its windshield, setting off the alarm and filling the sedan with a cloud of gas. Yet in recent years, Mtatsminda’s streets have been filling up with a different scent: the wafts of outstanding cooking. Or at least they were until Covid-19 came to town.

Tbilisi

Soplidan.ge: Virtual Farmers’ Market

Of the many benefits of village living, perhaps the greatest is eating locally grown, seasonal produce. Fresh eggs with tangerine-colored yolks, backyard chickens, buttery potatoes, and knurly, sweet carrots caked in clods of earth are beyond compare. But these treasures cannot be found in urban supermarkets, which stock mostly imported and some conventionally grown local produce. Garden-fresh fruits and veggies are even hard to find at food bazaars like Dezerterebi – forget organic. While there are a few specialty shops like Sunflower and Au Blé d’or selling organic products, selection is limited. The best way to load up on real-deal, straight-from-the-farm produce is to go directly to the source, or have it delivered to you.

Tbilisi

Cooking with Helena: Pelamushi, a Hearty Georgian Dessert

It used to be the only favors I asked of Helena Bedwell were for phone numbers of particular officials I could not otherwise get from my usual sources. Helena, a journalist for 25 years, knows everyone in Tbilisi. Then last week, I called her for some help of a more domestic kind: I wanted to learn how to cook a Georgian holiday dish. She offered to show me pelamushi, a voluptuous tooth-smacking porridge. A couple of years ago, the Georgian journalist published her first cookbook, “Georgian Flavors from Helena,” a homey, straightforward collection of her take on classic Georgian recipes designed for “busy and on-the-go” people like her who may be abroad and want to recreate Georgian dishes with a limited supply of time and ingredients.

Tbilisi

Essential Bites: Stoking the Svanuri in Georgia

Editor’s note: Normally when December rolls around, we ask our correspondents to share their “Best Bites,” as a way to reflect on the year in eating. But 2020 was not a normal year. So at a time when the act of eating has changed for so many, our correspondents will write about their “Essential Bites,” the places, dishes, ingredients and other food-related items that were grounding and sustaining in this year of upheaval. Last March we loaded the car with our best cooking gear, bought enough provisions at Carrefour to fill a big red shopping cart, and headed to Garikula to ride out the pandemic in our village sanctuary. The seasonal cold winds ripped down the Tedzami Valley to shake winter off the trees; before unloading the car, we stoked the wood-burning stove to shake it out of our walls.

Tbilisi

Georgian Kalata: Pandemic Pantry

Back in the days when we avoided restaurants because they were mobbed with tourists and not because they lacked outdoor seating, when we greeted friends with cheek kisses and never cringed in horror when a person coughed, Vinotheca sold wine from its storefront on Kote Apkhazi Street. A few meters away, Aristaeus Ethno Wine Bar served dambalkhacho fondu at its dinner tables. The two establishments shared the same owner, Gia Darsalia, who also had a shop called Kalata that sold “edible souvenirs,” as he calls them. We liked Kalata so much we tweaked our Tbilisi culinary walk for a stop there so guests could sample artisan cheeses and goodies like gozinaki, a walnut-and-honey candy served only during the holiday season in private kitchens.

Tbilisi

Essential Services: Amo Ra’s Frontline Lunch

We have been watching Covid-19 sweep across the country like an invisible alien death fog claiming hundreds of lives and snuffing out businesses, one by one. Some restaurants intent on survival have changed their menus to delivery-friendly offerings of shawarma, hamburgers and pizza. To save her lunch counter, 34-year-old Naia Gabelia has also chosen delivery, but her strategy is not about what to deliver, but to whom. Amo Ra is located on the 8th floor of the Gorgasali Business Center in the Ortachala district. Since 2018, the restaurant has been serving the Center’s tenants with tasty alternatives to the neighborhood’s limited khachapuri cafés. Amo Ra’s bread and butter, however, was its catering service, prepared by a small staff of talented cooks and served in the spaces at its disposal to rent for events.

Tbilisi

Piccolo Cafe: Breaking the Spell

On the bottom of Janashia Street and Melikishvili Avenue in the lower Vera district, next to the staid Hotel Sakartvelo, there used to be an unremarkable joint, about the size of a matchbox and tucked into a cozy square, selling khachapuri and muddy coffee. It was the kind of place nobody missed when it closed, as we knew someone else would come along and open another uninspired khachapuri café, rinse and repeat. An Iranian couple tried breaking the jinx by opening an Italian-inspired café named Piccolo, but they eventually closed. Last year Shinichiro (Shin) and Yukiko (Yuki) Ito took over the spot and kept the name, although they offered something Tbilisi had not yet seen – Japanese street food.

Tbilisi

Liquid Learning Curve: The Growth of Wine Education in Georgia

Our water glasses were filled to the brim with amber rkatsiteli. After the toast, Ramaz carefully lifted his glass to his nose, followed with a connoisseur’s affirmative head tilt and knocked it back, not coming up for air until the glass was dry. “Super wine!” he exclaimed, smacking his lips and exhibiting the most sophisticated appreciation I had yet witnessed in the birthplace of wine. These were the years locals described wine as either “clean” or not. No one evaluated the nose or flavors because wine was what you washed a sagging table full of food down with, toast after toast, to the bottom, pitcher by pitcher. We judged wine by hangover intensity. The milder the headache, the cleaner – and better – the wine.

Tbilisi

Flower Power: A Budding Distiller’s Lilac Chacha

We have a Georgian friend named Besik who worked in the Sudanese desert removing landmines. At base camp he came across an old pressure cooker and copper tubing and fashioned himself a little still he filled with fermented bananas. To his workmates, Beso was nothing less than a hero, as Sudan had been dry since 1983. “But banana chacha?” we cried. “Sure,” he said. “You can make chacha from any fruit.” Technically, chacha is fermented grape pomace, but the word is also synonymous with “white lightening” and is used to describe any fruit-based spirit, including quince, feijoa and melon. There is now a flower-based chacha, too, thanks to a Tbilisi woman who has created a smooth distillation from lilacs.

Tbilisi

Au Blé d’or: Grain of Truth

Someone once said that humanitarian workers are like mercenaries, missionaries or madmen. It is a description we have also applied to expats who end up in far-flung places like Georgia. Like the foreigner out in the secluded Kakhetian village of Argokhi, between the Alazani River and the Caucasus Mountains, who has forged his life growing a nearly extinct variety of native wheat and baking it into bread; but he is no madman. He’s a Frenchman. We had first heard about Jean-Jacques Jacob some years ago while visiting the Alaverdi Monastery in Kakheti, when a friend pointed north of the giant cathedral and told us of a Frenchman who had started a farm in the middle of nowhere.

Tbilisi

Au Blé d’or: Grain of Truth

Someone once said that humanitarian workers are like mercenaries, missionaries or madmen. It is a description we have also applied to expats who end up in far-flung places like Georgia. Like the foreigner out in the secluded Kakhetian village of Argokhi, between the Alazani River and the Caucasus Mountains, who has forged his life growing a nearly extinct variety of native wheat and baking it into bread; but he is no madman. He’s a Frenchman. We had first heard about Jean-Jacques Jacob some years ago while visiting the Alaverdi Monastery in Kakheti, when a friend pointed north of the giant cathedral and told us of a Frenchman who had started a farm in the middle of nowhere.

Tbilisi

Wine Week 2020: The Vine Whisperer of Imereti, Georgia

Editor’s note: Inspired by our Wine Clubs in Tbilisi, Lisbon and Athens and the grape harvest season, we have asked our correspondents to share the stories of winemakers and wine shops that are making a splash in their city for our Wine Week 2020. We are in Terjola, Imereti, sitting at a cozy front-yard table under a womb-like gazebo of intertwined grape vines, and our host Gia Chubinidze has brought another pair of bottles for us to try. We had already gone through a host of whites and were moving on to his reds. “This one had 14 days of skin maceration,” he declares of his 2019 otskhanuri sapere with a nose of black pepper and licorice. It is outstanding wine, like everything he has poured for us, but then Gia is no ordinary winemaker.

Tbilisi

CB on the Road: Lia Deida, Everyone’s Favorite Aunt

We pull off the recently finished section of highway at the Argveta exit in Imereti, follow Google Maps to a hand-painted sign directing us along a bumpy lane to an open iron gate with painted flowers, and park our car as if we live here. The front yard is lush with fruit trees, children’s toys are neatly scattered about, and a hammock under the shade of a large walnut invites us to lounge next to an enormous stone table. Before we sit here and never get up, Giorgi Zhorzhorladze steps out of his neat two-story house trimmed in red bricks, greets us with a warm “Gamarjoba!” (“Hello there!”) and welcomes us inside, to another realm.

Tbilisi

CB on the Road: The Batumi Fish Market, A Sole Survivor

In 2013, Anthony Bourdain and the Parts Unknown team arrived in Batumi, the capital of Adjara, to shoot the first segment of their Georgian adventure. The show’s producers invited Zamir Gotta, a Russian sidekick unfamiliar with the city, to join him. They visited a casino, strip club and mediocre restaurant for khashi, tripe soup, which failed to impress Bourdain. When the episode aired, local social media users flamed with disappointment over the Batumi portion in particular: “Casinos and strip clubs! That’s not Batumi!” While they aren’t the places we would have taken Anthony Bourdain, they are most certainly Batumi, along with the rainy summers and stifling subtropic air, the new five-star hotels and crumbling Khrushchyovkas (Soviet apartment buildings), a McDonald’s housed in an award-winning modern structure and a chacha-spouting fountain that dried up shortly after it was built in 2012.

Tbilisi

Liquid Assets: Borjomi Mineral Water, Georgia’s Iconic Elixir

It was a scorcher of a summer day in 2002, and we were pushing our broken Russian motorcycle and sidecar through crowded Plekhanov streets with a gnarly case of cotton mouth. Dripping in sweat, we limped up to the kiosk by our building and slipped some coins to the lovely Irma for a lifesaving cold bottle of Borjomi mineral water. She reached into her little fridge and passed a bottle to our trembling hands. We twisted it open, took a deep three-gulp pull and grabbed our neck in a panic, alcoholic vapors steaming from every pore of our body. Gasping, we handed the bottle back to her. “This is not Borjomi,” we wheezed. She sniffed it and jumped back. “Oh sorry. That is my husband’s spiritus,” she explained, replacing it deep into the fridge with a real bottle after checking it first.

Tbilisi

Salobie: Back to Beans

We met Tega at a friend’s dinner table shortly after moving to Tbilisi in 2002. Tall, debonair, with dark puppy eyes and an ever-present Colgate smile, Tega made it a point from that first meeting to take us under his wing and introduce us to the best Tbilisi had to offer. That was how we first ended up at Salobie, near the ancient capital of Mtskheta. “This place is famous for its beans,” he said. “And its name is Beans!” he chortled (lobio means “beans” in Georgian, and salobie is “house of beans”). The restaurant felt like something between a museum and a summer mountain resort. We were in the original dining room, built next to a giant 300-year-old wooden house from Racha.

Tbilisi

Notes on Reopening: A Slow Restart for Tbilisi’s Restaurants

Last week we stopped at Prego, a Georgian-owned Italian restaurant, for an extra-large pizza paradiso, a delicate thin crust brushed with a light tomato sauce and baked, then topped with thin slices of ham, fresh tomatoes and shredded lettuce, and sprinkled with fresh parmesan. For summer, there isn’t a more refreshing pizza pie. We were the only seated customers and had to wait around 30 minutes for the kitchen to finish an enormous two-scooter delivery order. We might have grumbled had this not been July 2020, when a global pandemic has every restaurant owner in the country gnawing their fingernails to stubs. We were happy to see that our favorite place for pizza was serving at all.