As the calendar year turns over, we’ve grown accustomed to the barrage of lists telling us where to travel during the next 12 months. Oftentimes these places are a country or even a whole region – you could spend an entire year exploring just one of the locations listed and still barely make a dent. We like to travel on a smaller scale. Forget countries and cities, for us the neighborhood is the ideal unit of exploration. Celebrating neighborhood life and businesses is, of course, essential to what we do as Culinary Backstreets. Since our founding in 2012, we’ve been dedicated to publishing the stories of unsung local culinary heroes and visiting them on our food walks, particularly in neighborhoods that are off the beaten path.

Editor’s note: We’re celebrating another year of excellent backstreets eating by taking a look back at our favorite restaurants and dishes of 2017. Starting things off is a dispatch from our Tbilisi bureau chief Paul Rimple: In 2001, a chic fashion designer opened up a snazzy café in the Vake Park building we were living. The low quadratic furnishings were not made for comfort, but were perfect for posing with your nose in the air and a cigarette between your fingers. It was the only cafe in this part of town and lucky us, it was downstairs.

Churchkhelas, Georgia’s traditional homemade energy bar made of grape must, nuts and flour, and dried and candied fruits add a burst of color at the Deserter’s Bazaar in Tbilisi. While the churchkhelas and dried fruits are Georgian, the candied fruits generally come from Central Asia.

Before gentrification, Tbilisi’s ancient bath district of Abanotubani was a collage of dome-roofed sulfur baths and carpet shops, claustrophobic grocery stores and teahouses packed inside crooked multi-storied brick buildings with condemnable wooden balconies, a sneeze away from collapse. Yet this quarter is the nucleus of Tbilisi, the site of its founding and from where the multicultural city grew to become a key hub along the Silk Road. Today it is home to a tight, multiethnic community of mostly Azeris, who have lived here for generations. Directly above the baths is the 120-year-old Jumah Mosque, renowned for being a place of worship for both Shia and Sunni Muslims.

We spent the summer in Georgia’s Shida Kartli region, a vast expanse of fertile terrain in the heart of the country that we have fallen crazy in love with. One day, over a glass of local Chinuri wine, we wondered aloud, “Every other region in the country has signature dishes, but what about Kartli? What are its signature dishes?” We asked our neighbors and got a lot of shoulder shrugs. Shota, a 65-year-old contractor, re-called his grandmother’s soups. “They had fruit,” he said. Seventy-year-old Maro said she too ate fruit soups as a child. Thus began our plan to dig up forgotten Kartli recipes, someday.

The author of 14 books, Carla Capalbo is best known for her food- and wine-centric travelogues exploring the lesser-known regions and culinary traditions of Italy. Her last book, “Collio: Fine Wines and Foods from Italy’s Northeast,” took readers on a gustatory journey through a tiny region that few outside Italy – or even inside Italy, for that matter – know much about. Several years ago, Capalbo – who was born in New York, raised in Paris and spent some 20 years living in Italy – became intrigued by Georgia and its cuisine. For her newest book, “Tasting Georgia: A Food and Wine Journey in the Caucasus” (Interlink Books), Capalbo traversed the country’s culinary backroads, collecting stories and recipes along the way.

When it comes to fragrances, nothing makes you stop in your tracks and moan in delight more than the redolence of mtsvadi roasting on the coals of grape vine trimmings. It’s the juicy sizzling fat basting the chunks of skewered pork that clinches it and makes whiffing the browning meat just as good as eating it. For one October weekend every year, the entire center of Tbilisi is immersed in wafts of barbecue from perhaps hundreds of hot grills, called makhali, as men, teary-eyed in billows of smoke, turn the skewers in pop-up sidewalk picnic parties. This is part of an annual event called Tbilisoba, a kind of Georgian Oktoberfest, but much cooler.

An important part of our chacha journey is making sure that the moonshine still is sealed with a putty made of ash, earth and water.

The Telavi-Gurjaani Highway is a two-lane ribbon that meanders across the fertile Alazani Valley, linking sedate east Georgian hamlets together like a string of old lights. Not a lot happens out here; SUVs and new sedans speed past lethargic jalopies and donkeys pulling carts of sticks, while men sit under the shade of the trees watching the world go by. The vibe changes in September, though, when the slumbering villages spark to life. It’s harvest time, and the rural road is suddenly busy with cars, dump trucks and tractors pulling trailers – all either packed with grapes or one their way to the fields to pick them. This is Georgia’s largest wine region and nearly every family here has some stake in the winemaking process.

In 2005, the city of Tbilisi bulldozed a riverside row of some the best restaurants in the capital to make way for a lackluster park and a gondola to take tourists to the ancient ruins of the Narikala Fortress, which overlooks the Old Town. City Hall justified this act of gastronomic destruction by stating the property had been illegally privatized under the previous administration, but everyone knew it was a land grab. And among the many restaurants it razed was Megrelebi Manoni, the best Megrelian restaurant in Tbilisi. Of all the regions that make up “Georgian cooking,” the western province of Samegrelo is the most distinctive.

Tbilisi's main bazaar offers a vast array of goods, including a wide variety of the choicest pork cuts. We didn't say it was for the faint of heart! 

The table was a motif of fresh delights we had never seen before, all the ingredients from the family garden. In due time we would learn about pkhali, chicken tsatsivi and the intrepid Georgian ratatouille, ajapsandali; however, the only thing on our minds was surviving the barrage of toasts our host Aleko was pummeling us with. In Georgia guests are considered gifts from God, though it was clear from the beginning that the god Aleko had in mind was Bacchus. If we failed to drain the water glass full of his wine to the bottom, he would refill it and force us to do the toast right a second time.

We recently spoke with the wine writer Miquel Hudin about his new Vinologue guidebook, Georgia: A Guide to the Cradle of Wine. Hudin was the 2016 recipient of the Geoffrey Roberts Award, an international wine prize, and was named the Best Drink Writer of 2017 by Fortnum & Mason Awards. He has also published a number of guidebooks on other wine regions. Your most extensive previous wine coverage has been about Spain. How come you decided to write a book about Georgia and its wine? Georgia has simply been a point of fascination for years. But it was frustrating to see the same handful of wines pop up time and again so I made the trip over and dived in deep, aided a great deal by winning the Geoffrey Roberts Award.

Rod is at his seat at the end of the bar, his booming Scottish voice subdued by the spirited dim of a couple dozen Friday night regulars speaking mostly English in a variety of accents. We make our way to the steam table in the corner of the room to find it empty. Looks like there may have been chicken wings in there. If you want to munch free food at the weekly happy hour at Betsy’s Hotel bar, you have to get here at 6 p.m., when it starts.

Here's a flashback to our special event in the countryside of eastern Georgia, where we learned about the process of making chacha, the ubiquitous moonshine culled from the remnants of winemaking. The day culminated in this epic feast. Stay tuned for the announcement of future dates!