It is 9 p.m. and we are packing our bags for a red-eye flight to Poland when I realize we have no chacha, Georgia’s otherworldly elixir of distilled fermented grape pulp. We never, ever travel without chacha, and there is no way we’re going to buy over-the-counter, factory-produced product – and not because it’s over-priced. Chacha is a potion brewed by the hands of masters over wood fires in hammer-battered stills sealed in a paste of dirt and ash. Without the human touch – the artistry – chacha is just a soulless, liver-grinding liquor. I make the call. Andria deals in wine, chacha and religion from a devilish little cellar in Tbilisi’s old neighborhood of Sololaki.

It’s a mid-week spring day in Tbilisi and we have joined Dali Berdzenishvili and her family for a special picnic lunch. There’s a zesty looking spread covering most of a yellow and blue tablecloth: heaps of khachapuri (cheese bread), blinchiki (meat rolls), sliced meats and sulguni cheese, salads, a trademark Georgian dish of pickled greens known as jonjoli, a bowl of strawberries and a few slices of leftover Easter paska cake. For drinks, there are several bottles of semi-sweet red and a bottle of homemade grape juice. Dali says her late husband, Zviad, loved a picnic like this. And it is Zviad who brings them all here – because they are eating next to his grave.

Editor’s note: In the latest installment in our Book Club series, we spoke to Alice Feiring, author of For the Love of Wine: My Odyssey through the World’s Most Ancient Wine Culture (Potomac Books, 2016). She is the author of two other books, publishes the newsletter The Feiring Line, has written for numerous publications and has received a James Beard Award for her writing. How did this book come about? Amazingly, the Georgian government asked me for an “Alice kind of book” that they could use promotionally. It was a small, no-strings-attached, rambling essay on Georgian wine. I realized I had written a book proposal, so I developed the idea and took it from there.

The kids were playing in the park, and Dad needed a cup of coffee for the caffeine boost to keep up with his daughter. Luckily there was a café nearby – where you would least expect one. The park is a modest little playground patch in a residential neighborhood across from the funicular that hauls people up and down Mtatsminda mountain to the amusement park and restaurant above the city. The café is on the ground floor of a Communist-era apartment block, just a couple dozen paces away. It was everything a little coffeehouse should be: warm, cozy, quiet and wheelchair accessible.

This steaming serving of ckmeruli (Georgian garlic chicken) is guaranteed to keep vampires away for a week. One may encounter a tasty (and protective) dish like this on our Tbilisi walk.

There used to be a state-owned publishing house in our neighborhood with a cafeteria that served a proletariat menu that included ostri (beef stew), cold slices of beef tongue and cutlets with buckwheat or mashed potatoes. It was a stolovaya, which is the Russian word for “canteen,” but a more accurate translation would be “human fueling station of protein, carbs and vodka.” It was gutted several years ago; its ghosts now haunt the dining room of a designer hotel.

In Tbilisi, we have mornings when we wake up wrinkled and dehydrated, and as we lie in bed knuckling the sleep from our eyes, we hear an all too familiar chorus beckoning us to “bite me, slurp me, gobble me down….” That is khinkali singing, and when you hear the melody, your day has been cast. You can forget about work and responsibilities. We used to fritter away our afternoons with a platter of khinkali at Pasanauri, but when it changed owners and attitude and our beloved waitress Irma packed her bags, it was clear an era had passed. A period of pretty good khinkali at pretty good restaurants followed until we asked local filmmaker and fellow gastromaniac Levan Kitia where he goes for khinkali.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment in our series of illustrated dispatches covering local spots in and around Georgia’s capital. Contributor Andrew North is an artist and journalist based in Tbilisi who spent many years before that reporting from the Middle East and Asia. So it’s thanks to Genghis Khan that we find ourselves in a Tbilisi restaurant kitchen eight centuries later, watching chef Lena Ezieshvili make khinkali, Georgia’s famous meat dumplings. That’s one thought that skitters through my head as I try to follow her wink-quick hands folding circles of dough around dollops of meat and herbs before neatly pinching them off at the top into that distinctive khinkali shape.

This well-stocked spice stand is found at Tbilisi's Deserter's Bazaar, the city's largest open-air market which forms a central part of our newly-launched walk.

Tbilisi’s Vake Park district is an upscale neighborhood full of designer cafés and fancy-looking Georgian-European restaurants offering mediocre grub at prices that complement the black SUVs and silver Mercedes that crowd the streets. Sure, you can find a good place that serves up the typical tasty Georgian menu at a fair price. But for original Georgian cooking with particular attention to fresh ingredients and the process of putting them together so that all the individual flavors explode in your mouth, look no further than Citron Plus.

While much of the West celebrates Christmas in an orgy of shopping for presents that climaxes after a single dinner, Georgians commemorate the season with a 30-day binge of feasts that pretty much begins on December 17, Saint Barbara’s Day (Barbaroba), and peters out by January 19, the Orthodox Epiphany (Natlisgeba). Unlike Americans, Georgians don’t consume stuff for the holidays – they annihilate food. The best, if not most chaotic, place to stock up on victuals is the Dezertirebi Bazroba (“Deserter’s Bazaar”). Located near Tbilisi’s central train station, this raw, disorganized, 2,000-square-meter warren of unprocessed agrarian pabulum is the city’s largest open-air market.

Tbilisi stores and markets are festooned now with distinctive sausage-shaped candies called churchkhela, ready for New Year celebrations and then Orthodox Christmas on January 7. They are a very traditional Georgian specialty, usually homemade from grape juice thickened with flour and nuts.

Editor’s note: Tbilisi was a new addition to Culinary Backstreets this year, and as we look back on all the great eating we did in 2015, we can’t help but notice that so much of it took place in the city's Sololaki area. There’s a typecast in Georgia that when somebody wants to go into business, they open up a khinkali restaurant. There is a logic to that. About a million people live in Tbilisi, a city built impetuously along the hilly banks of the Mtkvari River. And the adoration every single one of these people has for this boiled dumpling is so reverent, it is as if they see Jesus and his disciples feasting on a steaming platter of kalakuri khinkali for the Last Supper as they bite a hole into the dumpling and slurp its tasty broth.

Editor's note: This is the first installment in our new monthly series, Tbilisi Sketches, with illustrated dispatches covering local spots in Georgia's capital. Contributor Andrew North is an artist and journalist based in Tbilisi who spent many years before that reporting from the Middle East and Asia.

The 19th-century homes in old Tbilisi neighborhoods were built in a style Georgians call “Italian Courtyards,” where through a gate or arch you enter a quad enclosed by stories of balconies shared by each family on the floor. This courtyard was the nucleus of each building, where kids safely romped around, monitored by adults from the windows above, as men contemplated domino moves at a table under a tree and women beat rugs on an iron rack in a corner.