Tbilisi

Kakheti Diary: A Popular Wine Region Sans Foreign Tourists

Georgia had planned to open its borders to tourists on July 1, and we had intended to do some wine tasting in Kakheti about the same time – two plans that failed utterly. While no one is really sure why Georgia spent weeks preparing us for an open border only to snuff the plan at the last minute, our plan fizzled because we could not find a designated driver. But we still had a holiday. We stayed at Vazisubani Estate, a 19th-century palace that belonged to Sulkhan Chavchavadze, a nobleman with a penchant for winemaking and 20 hectares of vineyards, which became victims of a history that included the Romanovs, as well as the Soviets.

Tbilisi

Picnic Week 2020: Tbilisi

Editor’s note: As summer heats up, we’re looking to get outside. So we asked our contributors to write about their favorite spots to eat outdoors as well as nearby shops to fill a picnic basket for Picnic Week 2020. The greatest picnic in my life was at an elevation of 6,100 feet in the Tushetian village of Omalo for Mariamoba, Assumption Day, 2001. Sheep were escorted three times around the local chapel before being slaughtered in a ritualistic “sacrifice,” then butchered into chunks and boiled in a cauldron for khashlama, a type of stew, and ground into khinkali meat. Toast after toast of wine and chacha brought from the Kakheti lowlands made for the greatest bacchanalia in the name of the Virgin Mary, ever. In the morning, bodies littered the meadow, fetal and sprawled, where their last stumbling steps dropped them on their way home like sacks of boneless flesh.

Tbilisi

Fine(d) Dining: Tbilisi Restaurants Face Penalties Upon Reopening

The officials from the Ministry of Health came late in the evening on a Friday night and entered Tbilisi’s popular gastro-entertainment complexes Fabrika and Ghvinis Karkhana-Wine Factory #1. They knew there would be a lot of people here celebrating life again after two and a half months in lockdown. They also understood that even with tables spaced two meters apart, as required, it is difficult to control social distancing after people have had a few drinks. For authorities looking to tally up some fines, it was like shooting ducks in a wine barrel. A total of 16 establishments were fined 10,000 lari ($3,273) in what restaurant owners have described as “raids” two weekends ago for violating Covid-19 regulations. Among the six places at Ghvinis Karkhana that were penalized was Number 8 BBQ House for not having a list of employee temperatures and violating social distancing rules.

Tbilisi

Notes on Reopening: Back to Life at Tbilisi’s Deserter’s Bazaar

My love affair with the Deserter’s Bazaar began in 2001 when I first wandered into the marketplace like a pie-eyed flower child on his very first acid trip. The air seethed with leaded exhaust, stinky cheese, stale body odor and the incessant honking of jalopies. Streets and sidewalks disappeared under tables and blankets displaying everything from village produce and contraband alcohol to Dostoevsky novels and wooden utensils. Shoulder-to-shoulder, people bumped and shuffled and haggled while sweaty men with cigarettes hanging from their lips parted the mass with iron push carts. I returned to Georgia the next year and, as luck would have it, shacked up with a friend a block away from the market, which became my playground. Six somewhat square blocks selling anything you could put a tag on.

Tbilisi

Tedzami Valley Wine: Cracking the Kvevri

Gio Malatsidze kneels down and carefully brushes sand off the plexiglass lid of his kvevri. Five hundred liters of tavkveri wine have been resting for two years in this large clay vessel buried in the ground. Next to it is an open kvevri of healthy chinuri, also two years old. He gently pries the lid off, sealed with silicone putty, cautious not to let any debris fall inside, and frowns. A white film is floating on the surface. Gio dips a wine glass inside, spreading the flotsam away and takes a sip of the dark plum colored wine, washing his mouth with it. It is on the edge but can be rescued, he explains, dipping a carafe to fill our glasses so we can taste what he is talking about. Making natural wine is a risky business.

Tbilisi

First Bites: Tbilisi

The last time I was in a restaurant was March 7. I had bumped into three friends at Sulico Wine Bar and after draining our last bottle of wine we walked down to Republic 24, chef Tekuna Gachechiladze’s latest tour de force. Recalling the lustrous pork belly and the devilish succulence of her khinkali is making me salivate like a thirsty vampire, particularly after burping the blasphemous supermarket khinkali we pulled out of the freezer and boiled for lunch just now. We evacuated Tbilisi shortly after that, stoked up the wood burner in Garikula and unpacked our bags. With a pantry packed with provisions, our first weeks in the village went by as pleasantly as could be during a global pandemic.

Tbilisi

Notes on Reopening: Small Wineries on Shaky Ground

This year was going to be a big one for Oda Family Winery. Since its humble beginning in 2016, the winery and family farm-to-table restaurant in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region had been carefully expanding with the increasing popularity of its outstanding wine and formidable fare. This year, Keto Ninidze and Zaza Gagua calculated 3,000 guests would visit their restaurant, located in the front yard of their family’s oda (a traditional wooden two-storey house) in Martvili, so they emptied their savings and added new washrooms and a storage room for wine equipment, made a larger garden, and advertised for seven more employees to add to their staff of three. Then coronavirus arrived. “Thank God I didn’t hire any of the applicants and they didn’t leave their jobs,” Keto says.

Tbilisi

Notes on Reopening: An Uncertain Future for Ezo

The coronavirus infection rate is currently slowing down in Georgia to only several a day (with an occasional exception), and this is about four weeks after Easter, during which some churches insisted on still holding services and had us all biting our nails. Travel restrictions are being lifted, and the government has penciled in June 8 as the day restaurants with outdoor seating can reopen. We just don’t know what conditions will be imposed on everyone. Will waitstaff and clients have to wear masks? How many people per table? Will khinkali be served in individual portions instead of on a huge communal platter? There are lots of questions, perhaps the biggest being, “Who will survive?”

Tbilisi

At Home with Maka Shengelia: Hands in the Paska Dough

Sunday, April 19, was Easter in the Orthodox Christian world, the holiest day of the year. Like most people in today’s pandemic world, Maka Shengelia, one of our walk leaders in Tbilisi, was home being a responsible citizen. But she was also spreading butter on her own freshly baked paska, Easter bread, popular in the Eastern Church. It is a tall, dome-shaped cake, inseparable from Easter’s other “edible decoration,” boiled eggs dyed a deep magenta with endro (madder root). God will forgive you for celebrating Easter without going to church, but commemorating it without red eggs and paska is another matter entirely.

Tbilisi

Coronavirus Diary: Garikula

The aggressive spring winds took a break, and I can finally hear the village: the nearby river rolling through the valley, roosters singing, chickens gossiping and our dog barking at who knows what. Garikula is our summer retreat, but thanks to Covid-19, we got here a season early. The young cherry blossoms just popped this morning, and the tulips – gifts from our Dutch neighbors trapped in Rotterdam – opened wide yesterday while the plum, apple and pear trees are in full bloom. In ordinary times, our patio is full of boisterous friends as the delirious waft of mtsvadi roasting on oak coals fills the air. The only infections we are used to here are laughter and inebriation. But now, even our neighbor Zakhar stays away.

Tbilisi

Riravo: A Brandy Joins the Fight Against Covid-19

I don’t recall who first poured us a shot of Riravo’s plum araki, or brandy, but I do remember the surprise at the subtleness of the cool spirit as it smoothly slipped over my tongue and down my gullet. Finally, someone was making a fruit brandy that didn’t smell like a soiled pair of grandpa’s socks. Later, friends recounted a fabulous brandy tasting they attended at the Riravo distillery in Saguramo, a village just north of Tbilisi. I tightened with pangs of envy from missing out. “You have got to meet Goga, the owner,” they urged, and I agreed, wondering whom I could get to be my designated driver out to his place. In the meantime, I’d sip a Riravo pear or persimmon brandy as a digestif when opportunity called and remind myself to get out to Saguramo soon.

Tbilisi

Coronavirus Diary: Tbilisi

Covid-19 officially arrived in Georgia on February 26 with a Georgian man who had traveled home overland from Iran. That and international news coverage provoked a mad rush on face masks and an initial panic raid at several supermarkets. The government warned us to stop kissing when we greet each other and extended the springtime school holiday by a week. By March 6, a dozen Georgians had contracted the virus and the global death toll was in the thousands; we spent that evening with a few dozen people around a big table at Sulico Wine Bar tasting chacha, laughing and clinking our shot glasses to its antiseptic powers.

Tbilisi

Dadi Wine Bar: A Liquid Bridge Between Georgia and Russia

Last June, Georgian lawmakers invited a Russian legislator to address an international assembly of Christian Orthodox devotees from the Speaker of Parliament’s chair. This, predictably, did not go over well. Thousands poured into the streets and gathered at the Tbilisi parliament building demanding explanations, resignations and reform from a government many believe is much too cozy with the country that invaded Georgia in 2008, occupies some 20 percent of its territory and quietly moves the border whenever it feels like it. The protests were violently broken up by riot police, who shot rubber bullets into the faces of demonstrators. Russian President Vladimir Putin immediately imposed a ban on all direct flights from Russia to Georgia because Russians, he insisted, were in physical danger in Georgia, which wasn’t the case at all. Shortly after the ban, the BBC reported how welcomed Russian guests felt in Georgia. However, the relationship between the two peoples is rather complicated.

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

Aristaeus Ethno Wine Bar: Big Cheese

The name Aristaeus Ethno Wine Bar suggests many things, some puzzling but the most obvious being that wine is served. One look at the menu, though, and it becomes clear this spot is more restaurant than bar. One food item in particular caught our attention: dambalkhacho. We first heard of dambalkhacho some years back when a friend offered us hard, moldy cheese bits cut from a ball about the size of a healthy orange. It was rich, slightly peppery with a sharp, tart finish; nothing like any cheese we had ever tried.

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

Best Bites 2019: Tbilisi

2019 was a good year for prying ourselves out of our Tbilisi comfort zone, filling the tank and getting out of town. For us it is a way to connect to the captivating earthy genuineness that prompted us to move here, but this year we wanted to meet some of the people who have become part of what we call a “return to the village” trend. On one trip to Kakheti last winter, we visited Sopo Gorgadze and Levan (Leo) Tsaguria, a Tbilisi couple who left the city to resume new lives as farmers in the village of Shalauri. Kicking back in their living room looking at the Caucasus Mountains stretching across the Alazani Valley, we learned how they became cheesemakers more by coincidence than by design.

Tbilisi

Amra: Ode to Abkhazia

In Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, there is an old pier with a sorrowful rusting shell of a café poking out over the Black Sea. What had been a dining room is a vacant space that mostly seems to serve as a public urinal, while upstairs a kiosk-sized café serves Turkish-style coffee, beer and snacks with plastic tables and chairs for locals who bitterly recall when the café was one of the most happening spots in Sukhumi. Georgians and Abkhaz dined, drank and danced together at the café, called Amra, until war erupted in 1992, and these friends and neighbors began killing each other. Within a year, much of what had been the capital of the Soviet Union’s “Red Riviera” was destroyed and as the Abkhaz advanced, some 250,000 Georgians were forced to flee their homes, not realizing they would never be able to return.

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

Cured Comfort in Tbilisi

Miss Maria, a Tbilisi Armenian, sells cured pork, salted pork fat, and Armenian cured beef basturma and sujuk at the Deserter’s Bazaar. We meet her and other vendors like her as we meander through the market – a bustling medley of people selling those products that are the rudiments to Georgian cuisine – on our Tbilisi walk.

Tbilisi

Vino Underground: Wine Heaven

Ènek poured a rosy-colored splash of wine into our glasses, avidly explaining how this particular Aladasturi grape vine was meticulously cultivated in its native west Georgia. In a tasting ritual uncommon in Georgia, we swirled it, sniffed it and savored the flavor as it caressed our tongues. Here in the “cradle of wine,” the land where viticulture is believed to have originated 8,000 years ago, wine is customarily poured into a water glass and “tasted” in one long drag, until drained. But in this cozy cellar in the heart of Tbilisi’s historic Sololaki neighborhood, seven winemakers have come together to offer an alternative convention to winemaking and consumption. They call it Vino Underground, but we call it wine heaven.

Tbilisi

Wine Harvest 2019: Grape Expectations in Samegrelo

We used to spend a lot of time in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region when breakaway Abkhazia was our beat. Zugdidi, the regional capital, was our overnight stop coming and going across the river to the disputed land in the north. Our local friends would welcome us with Megrelian hospitality, decorating their tables with hearty and spicy local fare that made us purr. The wine, however, with its sweet barnyard vinegary tang, was a different story. We assumed that this subtropic-like land, with its year-round lushness and mandarin, hazelnut and overgrown tea fields, was hostile to good wine grapes. We didn’t realize back then that the practice of making sugar-wine was not exclusively a Megrelian thing, but a Communist legacy practiced throughout the country.

Tbilisi

In the Cradle of Wine: Documenting a Georgian Culinary Adventure

Georgia is a small country with a huge appetite for life. This passion is evident in all aspects of the country’s extraordinary culture, from its ancient polyphonic songs and breathtaking national dances to its rich culinary heritage and winemaking tradition that goes back eight millennia. To become better acquainted with this unique region, we have organized a seven-day trip in partnership with Atlas Obscura – “In the Cradle of Wine: A Georgian Culinary Adventure” – that focuses on all the senses, with special emphasis on taste. It is a mouthwatering, belt-popping, intimate dive into the heart of Georgia.

Tbilisi

CB On The Road: Salt of the (Svanetian) Earth

The pavement ended about five kilometers back – that, combined with torrential rains, has made for a bumpy, muddy ride. We are in Kala, a scattering of old stone and wooden homes deep in the bowels of the Svanetian highlands. Tomorrow is Kvirikoba, the most revered religious holiday in the region. Hundreds of people will make the vertical pilgrimage to St. Kvirike and Ivlita’s Church, an 11th-century impossibility of a creation erected on a thumbnail of granite high above the wild Enguri River. Our host is 25-year-old Mariam Khardziani, who returned with her twin sister and aunt to their decaying family home two years ago; they fixed up the traditional two-story house, made of slate and wood, and now rent it as a summertime guesthouse.

Tbilisi

Day Drinking in Tbilisi

While wandering deep in the guts of the Deserter’s Bazaar, Tbilisi’s largest and oldest open-air marketplace, we stumbled upon the raffish wine section where men (mostly) drop by for a few toasts. Join our Old Market & Beyond walk to taste these authentic homemade wines and chacha – Georgia’s legendary take on grappa – for yourself.

Tbilisi

CB On The Road: Seeking Kubdari Perfection in Svaneti

It wasn’t so long ago that no one would venture to Georgia’s Svaneti region without a personal invitation, and even that was risky. Isolated, sky-high in the Caucasus, nestled between the breakaway territory of Abkhazia and the Russian Federation, it was land of the lost, inhabited by a tribe speaking their own language, living in hamlets dominated by tall medieval stone towers used for protection from invading hordes as well as from each other. Ancient pagan-Christian rituals, bride-napping, blood vendettas and banditry defined modern Svaneti – at least when viewed from the outside. We had heard too many stories of how oblivious tourists would wander there with cameras around their necks and big tourist grins only to return in their underwear with their heads hanging low. Like Georgians from the rest of the country, we stayed away.

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

Cafe Littera: A Tbilisi Culinary Pioneer Faces an Uncertain Future

On June 20, Georgian Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze signed a decree abolishing the Writer’s House of Georgia, Tbilisi’s leading institution of literary culture and the home of Cafe Littera, the restaurant that gave birth to the culinary revolution Georgia is currently going through. As soon as the ink was dry, the Writer’s House accounts were frozen and its directors were suddenly dismissed with only half a month’s salary. The fate of Cafe Littera is unknown. The story of the Writer’s House goes back to 1905, when philanthropist and father of Georgian brandy, David Sarajishvili, completed construction of an Art Nouveau masterpiece of a house to commemorate his 25th wedding anniversary to Ekaterine Porakishvili.

Tbilisi

Kiwi Vegan Café: Carnivores Welcome

We had heard about Kiwi Vegan Café even before a dozen thuggish carnivores raided the little vegan restaurant in 2016, munching grilled meat, smoking cigarettes, throwing sausages and fish at customers and starting a brawl that spilled out onto the street. The incident grabbed international headlines, setting the café as a battleground of Western liberalism versus Georgian nationalist extremism. Indeed, many Georgians fear their identity is threatened by “non-traditional” values, such as homosexuality, non-Orthodox religions and electronic music culture. In a land that boasts of its longstanding virtue of tolerance we are seeing a rise in neo-fascist groups and xenophobia.

Tbilisi

Kiwi Vegan Café: Carnivores Welcome

We had heard about Kiwi Vegan Café even before a dozen thuggish carnivores raided the little vegan restaurant in 2016, munching grilled meat, smoking cigarettes, throwing sausages and fish at customers and starting a brawl that spilled out onto the street. The incident grabbed international headlines, setting the café as a battleground of Western liberalism versus Georgian nationalist extremism. Indeed, many Georgians fear their identity is threatened by “non-traditional” values, such as homosexuality, non-Orthodox religions and electronic music culture. In a land that boasts of its longstanding virtue of tolerance we are seeing a rise in neo-fascist groups and xenophobia.

Tbilisi

Khinkali Chronicles, Part III: Sioni 13

We bit into the khinkali, its handmade dough indelicate and sticky, as we like it. Steam poured out the newly made hole, and we blew lightly before slurping up the rich stock and gobbling the dumpling down, even the puckered knob. The ground pork and beef was packed with fresh cilantro, the juices absorbed into the jacket. It was a perfect khinkali. A home wrecker. This seducer of a dumpling is molded by the knowing hands of Manana Osapashvili, born in Gudamakhari, a mountain village in Pasanauri, the heartland of khinkali. A professional cook for 29 years, Manana has been making khinkali since she was 10 years old. Today, she is running the kitchen at Sioni 13, located at the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in Old Town. It is a part of the city known for its tourists and hookah bars, and the mediocre "traditionnel" Georgian restaurants that cater to them.

Tbilisi

Cheese in Sheep’s Clothing

Guda cheese is sheep cheese from eastern Georgia, aged in guda, which is sheep skin. Nowadays most guda is aged in plastic, but we found one vendor at the Deserter’s Bazaar who has the real deal in her stall, which comes from Tusheti in the high Caucasus.

Tbilisi

CB on the Road: Khvanchkara Wine, Racha’s Nectar

You pass through the doleful Imeretian coal town of Tkibuli, wind 750 meters up the Nakerala pass and just as you catch your breath from the climb, you lose it again dropping down from the summit, for you have entered Racha-Lechkhumi, one of the most gorgeous regions in Georgia. We were first here in 2004, for an art festival organized by a local poet who had the unnerving habit of always speaking in verse. Since that mind-bending weekend, the regional capital of Ambrolauri hasn’t changed much. There is a new little airport, a few modest hotels, a couple humble restaurants, and a giant bottle of Khvanchkara that still stands in the middle of town, though it has been renovated. The vibe is as mellow as ever.

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

Georgian tea from Guria in Tbilisi

West Georgia's climate is ideal for tea, and Georgia has been producing high quality tea since 1847. On our Old Market & Beyond culinary walk in Tbilisi, we get a chance to see, smell and taste fine samples of tea and other delicacies in the Dezerter's Bazaar - the Georgian capital’s largest and oldest open-air marketplace.

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

Meet the Vendors: Tina’s Spice Stall in Tbilisi

We were strolling through the Dezerter’s Bazaar building when a little woman, about 5 feet tall, interrupted a pair of our German guests with “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Instantly charmed by her bright expression and linguistic dexterity, they stopped and chatted away in German. That’s how Tina Nugzarashvili became a must-stop on our Tbilisi market walk. Tina occupies stall number 10 in a building that used to be the epicenter of Tbilisi’s main farmer’s market, two blocks from the central train station. The old structure, built in the 1960s, was an enormous space under a tin dome crammed with mountains of corn and wheat flour, wheels of cheese stacked a meter high, plastic buckets of spices, pyramids of corn-fed chickens, and piles of fruits and vegetables, some neon red, others green and orange.

Tbilisi

Building Blocks: 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

Building Blocks: Matsoni, Fading Elixir of Long Life

We used to live near the Mtkvari River, in a ground-floor apartment with a single window looking into our courtyard, which was a dirt parking lot. The sun never made it to our window but every morning at the crack of eight, a woman would wake us with the melodious croon of “ma-tso-ni, mat-so-ni!” And if that didn’t wake us, her incessant tapping on our window certainly did. The payoff, however, was a jar full of the thickest, creamiest, most refreshing homemade yogurt, with just a perfect hint of tartness. So, we would shuffle out of bed, open the window and exchange our empty jars with her full ones.

Tbilisi

Pepperboy: Pan-Asian Paradise

Ivane Tarkhnishvili Street is a 300-meter stretch of blacktop in the Vera neighborhood that links the lower part of the quarter to the upper part. We used to drop off clothes for dry cleaning here and meet for coffee at Kafe Literaturuli, two establishments lost to the dustbin of time. For several years, we had no reason to venture to this part of the hood, until a friend tipped us off to a new place that opened last September. It’s called Pepperboy, and it is the one restaurant in Georgia that will take you on a wildly delectable ride through pan-Asian cuisines.

Tbilisi

Marleta Cheese: On Account of a Cow

She came to Kakheti from Tbilisi in 2005 and couldn’t drag herself away. The Alazani River Valley stretches long and wide to the feet of the Caucasus, the tallest mountains in Europe, which jut skyward like some citadel for the mountain gods. The expanse inspires reverence and awe. Kakheti intoxicates. “I want to live here,” Sopo Gorgadze told herself. She spent nearly every weekend and holiday in the region. One evening in Tbilisi, Sopo, a stage painter, met a tall, captivating architect at a friend’s dinner party. It wasn’t long after their first date in Kakheti that the couple left the capital behind and established themselves in the Kakhetian village of Shalauri.

Tbilisi

Ankara: Turkish Pioneer

We were living in an urban cave: a dark, cramped, one-room ground-floor apartment next to the Marjanishvili Theater in Plekhanov. At 60 bucks a month we could hardly complain – after all, there were greater things to grumble about. The year was 2002, and electricity was a capricious luxury that always seemed to go off the moment you came home only to come back on the moment you went to bed. And there were the cops, whose sole duty was to extort money from people. Occasionally, we would even gripe about dinner. “Georgian, again?” There were several greasyspoons along Aghmashenebeli, our main drag, which was often buried under a bone-rattling cacophony of gasoline-powered generators. The menus were all the same, so we would go to one place for their shkmeruli, another for ostri and the famed El Depo for khinkali. They were fine, but we missed variety.

Tbilisi

Winter Greens in Tbilisi

Named after the soldiers who fled the Czar’s army in the early 19th century and sold their guns and equipment there, the Deserter’s Bazaar today is the main food source of most of Tbilisi’s restaurants and many families seeking the best bargains in fresh produce, like the winter greens and veggies we spotted on a recent Old Market walk.

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

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

Keti's Bistro: Nouvelle Tbilisi

Going out for a Georgian dinner in Tbilisi used to be a predictable, belt-popping affair. There were very few variations on the menus of most restaurants, all of which offered mtsvadi (roast pork), kababi (roast pork-beef logs), ostri (beef stew) and kitri-pomidori (tomato-cucumber) salad. To open a restaurant and call it Georgian without these staple dishes would have been as ludicrous as a coffeehouse with no coffee. In the past several years, however, young local cooks have been expanding the rich possibilities of Georgian cuisine to both much applause and a lot of finger wagging for blaspheming traditional recipes.

Tbilisi

Hitting the Sauce: Satsivi Season in Tbilisi

There was no wind and we were in the middle of the Black Sea on a bright summer day, puttering across the deep blue expanse in a chaika, a small wooden Cossack war ship that its Ukrainian sail-ors had equipped with a diesel motor. We were two days out from Yalta, and our captain, Myron, was looking eastward towards our destination of Batumi, his blue eyes glazed in a dreamy state of longing. “Ah, Georgia. Satsivi,” he sighed. “Satsivi,” he repeated sensually to Roman, the first mate, as if it were the name of a beckoning siren. “I cannot wait.” I was impressed he didn’t sob for khinkali and khachapuri like everyone else. But still, I had to quickly snuff out his reverie.

Tbilisi

Best Bites 2018: Tbilisi

Editor’s note: We’re celebrating another year of excellent backstreets eating by taking a look back at our favorite restaurants and dishes of 2018. Starting things off is a dispatch from our Tbilisi bureau chief Paul Rimple. It was a wet, cold, gray autumn day, and we were shopping for household stuff at the East Point Mall, close to the airport, where we built up an appetite. Our home was being renovated, we had no kitchen, and the mall had a food court. We understood nothing here would taste good – the sushi, the pizza, the Asian noodles with a 30 minute wait – but were not prepared for the hideousness that passed as burgers and a chicken wrap from a world-renowned fast-food enterprise. “Of all the good places to eat at in this city,” my partner bemoaned, dropping her half-devoured chicken wrap on the plastic tray and pushing it away.

Tbilisi

Vinotheca: Ahead of the Pack

Before the tourists discovered Tbilisi, Kote Apkhazi Street was Leselidze Street, an unassuming cobblestone ribbon connecting Old Town’s bath district, Abanotubani, with Freedom Square. Home to the Georgian Synagogue, the Armenian Holy Church of Nazareth, and Father of The Cross Church, no other street represents the capital’s multi-ethnic and multi-denominational heritage better. Other than these houses of God, Leselidze hosted several religious shops, a couple of unremarkable restaurants, second-hand clothes shops and mom-and-pop groceries. No one foresaw the flocks of visitors that would invade the Old Town with their selfie sticks, but people understood the location had a future.

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.