Tbilisi

Extra Slow Food: Georgia’s Growing Snail Industry

For a while, French-Georgian fusion restaurant Métis, which opened in 2017, seemed to be the only place in town to get snails, served in their iconic snail khinkali. We took several trips to Akhaltsikhe and other areas of Samtskhe-Javakheti, asking for snails, and were always told the season was wrong or to look somewhere else. Then, in April 2021, Chef Guram Bagdoshvili added his riff on Meskhetian snails to the menu of his Georgian-Asian restaurant Chveni, and, with the recent addition of snail khinkali to their menu as well, today there are at least three snail dishes easily available to the avid Tbilisi gastropod consumer.

Tbilisi

CB On the Road: Eating Well (and Supporting Ukraine) in Batumi

In February 2022, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine, after having already occupied parts of the country since February 2014, Georgians responded with anger and solidarity. Drawing parallels to their experiences with the Russian-backed breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, people in Tbilisi organized huge rallies in front of Parliament, gathered humanitarian aid to send to Ukraine, opened their homes to refugees, made solidarity borscht and posted signs in their restaurants and other businesses saying Russians were not welcome. The mood a few hundred kilometers west in rainy Batumi this March was more subdued – the protests were smaller (the city is smaller), and while Ukrainian flags and anti-war slogans blanketed the city, we didn’t see any of the anti-Russian, or even anti-Putin, signs, posters and graffiti that had proliferated throughout Tbilisi.

Tbilisi

CB On the Road: Beyond the Adjaruli Khachapuri

These days, you can buy an Adjaruli khachapuri anywhere from a pizza chain in Bueno Aires to a grocery store in Tokyo. In Tbilisi, you can get this usually cheese- and egg-filled bread topped with meat and beans, cucumber-tomato salad or wild mushroom stew — the Adjaruli khachapuri has been having a years-long moment. Because of its ubiquity, outside of Georgia the word “khachapuri” has come to mean Adjaruli khachapuri, and the other word is forgotten. But at what cost! Adjara is the subtropical autonomous republic of western Georgia bordering Turkey and the Black Sea, and its cuisine has more to offer than solely the iconic cheese bread.