The godzilla-sized tree of lights is up on Freedom Square and a gazillion more streamers of lights twinkle for eight kilometers down Tbilisi’s main drag, a clear, impressive indication the holiday season is upon us once again. The best thing about celebrating Christmas here is that tradition does not require us to buy a bunch of stuff for people that they don’t need. In Georgia, the real meaning of Christmas is indulgence in the gastronomic sense. Birthdays notwithstanding, the first feast of the season is on December 17, Saint Barbara’s Day. Being an Orthodox Christian country, the December 25 is only celebrated by expats and those Georgians looking for an excuse to feast.

Few things in life are more rewarding than eating in Georgia. However, a single night at a Georgian restaurant can also be a terribly mortifying experience. Georgians like to order big but the palate can only take so much. All the worse for guests, as they are routinely tortured into learning just how magnificent Georgian cuisine is in one sitting. This is the kind of gluttony meant to send you to hell, and it totally short-circuits your senses. You cannot contemplate the simple flavors in a piece of tender veal stewed in a tomato and pepper sauce when the table is covered with plates upon plates of pkhali, khachapuri, mtsvadi and so on while being obliged to raise one more glass of wine to wash down yet another toast.

When we arrived in Tbilisi in 2001, there was one café/restaurant that was a beacon to those seeking an alternative to the traditional Georgian dining experience of stark rooms and banquet tables or greasy spoons with clunky tables and little stools. It was a funky little crooked house of pure originality that served the regular dishes, but with a personal homey touch that suited the place perfectly. Although it felt like a world apart, the art installation cafe was Georgian to the bone, being the creation of Rezo Gabriadze, the renowned artist, writer, sculptor and film and stage director.

Among the deep array of goods found at Tbilisi's Dezerter's Bazaar, the focal point of our culinary walk in the city, is a formidable selection of colorful and tasty pickles.

We have each got a couple of buckets and a pair of gardening clips and we are standing in a dewy vineyard in the middle of the majestic Alazani Valley. The autumn air is brisk, fresh with the fruity smell of grapes and the sun is warm, clouds permitting. Looming northward like some godly guardian of this huge, precious grape basket is the awe-inspiring Greater Caucasus range. It is rtveli, the harvest, and here in Kakheti, families across Georgia’s chief winemaking region are busy making wine much like their ancestors have done for centuries. They pick, crush and ferment wine in kvevri, enormous ceramic urns buried into the ground, or in oak barrels. They add nothing to enhance the fermentation process, the crushed grapes are stirred several times daily until they feel the maceration process is completed. The chacha, fermented skins, seeds and stems, is separated and set aside for distillation later, while the wine is left to age until the New Year feast season.

We’ve seen the doleful little building a hundred times, every time we cross Tbilisi’s Dry Bridge. With the seductive words chacha, grappa and vino hand-painted on the wall enticing us like a red-light district lures lonely sailors, we would move on, thinking, “one of these days.” Then one sweltering summer night our band got a gig at the biker bar next door to the sad little building. We had a half-hour to kill until show time, and we thought, surely, one shot won’t hurt. But instead of walking into a moonshine dispensary we found a little tourist shop packed with wine, ceramic vessels and assorted knick-knacks. The real discovery, however, were three refrigerators stocked with balls of craft cheeses.

Delicious churchkhelas, a string of nuts dipped in a thick roux of grape juice, are among the countless treats on offer at Tbilisi's Deserter's Bazaar, the focal point of our culinary walk in the Georgian capital.

We recently spoke with travel writer Caroline Eden and food writer Eleanor Ford about their new cookbook, Samarkand: Recipes & Stories from Central Asia & the Caucasus (Kyle Books; July 2016). Eden has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Financial Times, among other publications, while Ford has been an editor for the Good Food Channel, BBC Food and the magazine Good Food and currently writes about restaurants for Time Out. How did this book come about? Caroline Eden: It was an idea I was percolating for a long time, since about 2009. Travelling in Central Asia, mainly as a journalist but sometimes for fun, I got fed up with guidebooks dismissing the food in the region as “survival fare.”

The 2010 makeover of Tbilisi’s old town broke the hearts of many locals and preservationists, who lamented the destruction of the neighborhood’s original 19th-century buildings and the fabrication of their cinder block replicas. The quarter hadn’t seen destruction on such a scale since the Persian ruler Agha Mohammad Khan razed the city in 1795. Instead of bemoaning the architectural tragedy, one local artist seized the opportunity to inject some positive vibrations into the precipitous hillside district by purchasing a small house underneath the 16th-century walls of the Narikala Fortress and turning it into one of Tbilisi’s coolest cafe-restaurants. Getting there, however, requires a bit of cardiovascular effort.

You sit down for a meal with family or friends, and no one can decide what to order. Well, some can, some can’t, and it goes on for ages. The waiter stiffens when you ask one more time for her to come back. But go to the basement restaurant of Shavi Lomi in Old Tbilisi, and you have the answer for dithering relatives and pals: the gobi, or “Friends’ Bowl,” filled with a colorful selection of classic Georgian dishes. The word shares the same root as the Georgian word for “friend” – megobari – and so, of course, a gobi bowl is for sharing. It’s a big wooden bowl, filled with a mix of different dishes and as many spoons as you need.

We were cutting grapes in a vineyard in eastern Georgia’s Kakheti region when two young men led a goat by a rope to a nearby tree and sliced its neck with a hefty hunting knife. Our lunch. They offered us a sliver of fresh raw liver with sardonic smiles, insisting it was the best part, but we passed and waited for the meat to be cut, skewered and roasted over the coals of tsalami, or vines. Served with bread, razor-sharp sheep cheese, whole tomatoes, cucumbers and rkatsateli wine, nothing could have been more Kakhetian. Since that harvest, we have been to scores of Kakhetian restaurants in Tbilisi, most of which were gratifying, but none had goat on their menus.

Take the plunge into the high-volume hubbub of Tbilisi’s famous Deserter’s Bazaar and you’ll come under a three-senses assault. The piquant aroma from the spice stalls, a butchers’ shouting war and stalls swinging with burgundy-brown, candle-shaped churchkhela sweets. But on one side of the market building, there’s a small slice of calm – in the long corridor where the cheese sellers work. Selling homemade cheeses from across the country, delivered fresh every day, is a more relaxed and deliberate business. You’ve heard of the Slow Food movement. Perhaps it’s time we were more specific and talked about “slow cheese.” Here, the cheese sellers prefer to wait for the customers to come to them.

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.