Tbilisi

Best Bites 2021: Tbilisi

With 2021 drawing to a close, we have much to be thankful for. Though Tbilisi, like all of Georgia, still faces struggles with the continuing pandemic, the harrowing days of 2020 – with its curfews and restrictions on gatherings (especially painful for Georgians, who are in the habit of meeting in large groups of friends and family) – are long gone. Restaurants, bars and cafes have been open again since February 2021, with indoor seating available since May, though opening hours would fluctuate based on spikes in Covid-19 transmission. When eateries fully reopened and the final curfew was lifted, we remember walking through Dedaena Park with friends late one night, not so long after regulations had largely relaxed; people were everywhere, some picnicking on the grass, a great many milling about, just glad to be out again amongst people.

Tbilisi

Terracotta: A Taste of Cozy Tbilisi

Amaghleba Street and its environs stretch like a long arm of the Sololaki neighborhood up into Tbilisi’s hills. The broad main street is lined with 19th-century brick buildings, some of them graced with the magnificent wooden balconies characteristic of Old Tbilisi. At No. 16 sits Terracotta, where a patinaed metal awning hangs over steps heading down into the small, welcoming restaurant and wine bar below. The warm earth tones inside evoke its history as a ceramics studio, and the vases, cups and plates on display are a direct inheritance of Tata Samkharadze, who took over her parents’ art space when they chose to close it in 2018. In its place, she opened a small restaurant a year later with cook Anna Burduli.

Tbilisi

Khinkali Chronicles, Part IV: Metis

Snail khinkali? It might sound, at first, like an odd combination. On closer consideration of Georgian cuisine and history, however, it makes good sense. For one thing – perhaps the most important – they’re tasty, and we have yet to hear anyone who’s tried them disagree. The signature dish at Metis restaurant, which is – for now at least –the only place in Tbilisi one can have them, they remind us more of mushroom than of meat khinkali: savory, smooth, a little buttery, with some brightness from parsley and a hint of pastis. Metis’ logo, a snail with a khinkali for a shell, expresses the playful blend of French and Georgian cuisines that owner Thibault Flament is pursuing in close collaboration with his chef, Goarik Padaryan.