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

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.