When our friend applied for a chef gig at the cooking department of a northern California community college, a board of evaluators gave him a pair of chicken breasts, a frugal selection of ingredients and said, “Create something.” He assessed his workspace and smiled. He saw white wine, chicken stock, butter, shallots and plenty of garlic. He dusted the breasts in flour and hocus-pocus, finished off the dish with a five-fingered pinch of chopped parsley and got the job. Garlic chicken works. Its humble transcendence has conquered the world over – and the more garlic, the merrier. In provincial France they roast a chicken with no less than 40 cloves of garlic for poulet aux 40 gousses d’ail, while Oaxacans make pollo oaxaqueño con orégano y ajo with 30 cloves.

Being an expat means learning to live without a lot of comforts that we ordinarily take for granted back home – things like bagels, ripe Haas avocados, extra-dry Martinis, corn tortillas and enforced traffic laws. Sometimes we meet people who have a hard time adjusting to a life without Pop-Tarts and spend their leisure time whining about everything that’s not like home. Other times you meet a person like Andrew Moffatt. A physicist by education, Andy was crunching numbers as a bank analyst in his native Australia when it dawned on him that there was a hell of a lot more to life than making PowerPoint presentations and status reports. He turned his back on the safe and predictable career and spent the next four years traveling the world, picking up cooking tips along the way.

It has been 12 months since the novel coronavirus was first detected in Georgia. It was about the same time two CB colleagues, Celia from Lisbon and Chiara from Naples, arrived for a brief visit and joined us for what would be one of our last food walks of the year. Later, we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Aristeaus, where four guys at a table casually sipping wine broke out into goose-bump-inducing polyphony while we dined near the fireplace on shkmeruli, kupati, dambalkhacho and a bottle of fine rkatsiteli. As dinner memories go, this ranks highly not only for its serendipitous brilliance, but also because it would be the last time we would ever eat there – the restaurant closed for good in late 2020.

Having food delivered used to feel like a very decadent thing to do in Tbilisi. Probably because our neighbors, who tend to be ever judging, would scurry to their windows at the sound of a full throttle motor scooter bouncing up our cobblestone lane. “What’s that they’re doing?” we could imagine them mumbling, watching us walk out as if we’re making a drug deal, self-conscious and counting out money only to hurry back home with a couple of pizza boxes. Nobody had meals delivered in Georgia. It didn’t take long, however, to get over our insecurity. When a takeout sushi joint opened a few blocks away, we called them to deliver instead of making the five-minute walk to fetch the maki rolls, simply because we could.

Anthony Bourdain liked to say the body is a playground, a sentiment we couldn’t agree with more, especially when digging into the cholesterol-laden acharuli khachapuri or wiping a ketsi clean of its spicy pool of kupati – Georgian sausage – grease with a piece of bread. Shots of chacha and glasses of wine make us swing, bounce, teeter-totter and sometimes fall, and in the morning when the fog and pain clears, we may remember that the body is also a fragile temple requiring more ministration than a sacrificial bowl of tripe soup can provide. In Tbilisi’s Mtatsminda district there is a sanctuary providing both solace to devotees of healthy eating and penance to gluttonous sinners like us. No ordinary hummus bar, this affectionate “eating apartment” is called Mama Terra – Veggie Corner.

For us, the neighborhood of Mtatsminda has long been associated with the sour smell of tear gas. When riots broke out over a stolen election in 2007, we found ourselves on a Mtatsminda side street, between a line of riot police below and protesters armed with bricks above – a very dumb place to be. A cop aimed his tear-gas gun at us and shot. We ducked behind a car and the canister broke its windshield, setting off the alarm and filling the sedan with a cloud of gas. Yet in recent years, Mtatsminda’s streets have been filling up with a different scent: the wafts of outstanding cooking. Or at least they were until Covid-19 came to town.

Of the many benefits of village living, perhaps the greatest is eating locally grown, seasonal produce. Fresh eggs with tangerine-colored yolks, backyard chickens, buttery potatoes, and knurly, sweet carrots caked in clods of earth are beyond compare. But these treasures cannot be found in urban supermarkets, which stock mostly imported and some conventionally grown local produce. Garden-fresh fruits and veggies are even hard to find at food bazaars like Dezerterebi – forget organic. While there are a few specialty shops like Sunflower and Au Blé d’or selling organic products, selection is limited. The best way to load up on real-deal, straight-from-the-farm produce is to go directly to the source, or have it delivered to you.

It used to be the only favors I asked of Helena Bedwell were for phone numbers of particular officials I could not otherwise get from my usual sources. Helena, a journalist for 25 years, knows everyone in Tbilisi. Then last week, I called her for some help of a more domestic kind: I wanted to learn how to cook a Georgian holiday dish. She offered to show me pelamushi, a voluptuous tooth-smacking porridge. A couple of years ago, the Georgian journalist published her first cookbook, “Georgian Flavors from Helena,” a homey, straightforward collection of her take on classic Georgian recipes designed for “busy and on-the-go” people like her who may be abroad and want to recreate Georgian dishes with a limited supply of time and ingredients.

Editor’s note: Normally when December rolls around, we ask our correspondents to share their “Best Bites,” as a way to reflect on the year in eating. But 2020 was not a normal year. So at a time when the act of eating has changed for so many, our correspondents will write about their “Essential Bites,” the places, dishes, ingredients and other food-related items that were grounding and sustaining in this year of upheaval. Last March we loaded the car with our best cooking gear, bought enough provisions at Carrefour to fill a big red shopping cart, and headed to Garikula to ride out the pandemic in our village sanctuary. The seasonal cold winds ripped down the Tedzami Valley to shake winter off the trees; before unloading the car, we stoked the wood-burning stove to shake it out of our walls.

Back in the days when we avoided restaurants because they were mobbed with tourists and not because they lacked outdoor seating, when we greeted friends with cheek kisses and never cringed in horror when a person coughed, Vinotheca sold wine from its storefront on Kote Apkhazi Street. A few meters away, Aristaeus Ethno Wine Bar served dambalkhacho fondu at its dinner tables. The two establishments shared the same owner, Gia Darsalia, who also had a shop called Kalata that sold “edible souvenirs,” as he calls them. We liked Kalata so much we tweaked our Tbilisi culinary walk for a stop there so guests could sample artisan cheeses and goodies like gozinaki, a walnut-and-honey candy served only during the holiday season in private kitchens.

We have been watching Covid-19 sweep across the country like an invisible alien death fog claiming hundreds of lives and snuffing out businesses, one by one. Some restaurants intent on survival have changed their menus to delivery-friendly offerings of shawarma, hamburgers and pizza. To save her lunch counter, 34-year-old Naia Gabelia has also chosen delivery, but her strategy is not about what to deliver, but to whom. Amo Ra is located on the 8th floor of the Gorgasali Business Center in the Ortachala district. Since 2018, the restaurant has been serving the Center’s tenants with tasty alternatives to the neighborhood’s limited khachapuri cafés. Amo Ra’s bread and butter, however, was its catering service, prepared by a small staff of talented cooks and served in the spaces at its disposal to rent for events.

On the bottom of Janashia Street and Melikishvili Avenue in the lower Vera district, next to the staid Hotel Sakartvelo, there used to be an unremarkable joint, about the size of a matchbox and tucked into a cozy square, selling khachapuri and muddy coffee. It was the kind of place nobody missed when it closed, as we knew someone else would come along and open another uninspired khachapuri café, rinse and repeat. An Iranian couple tried breaking the jinx by opening an Italian-inspired café named Piccolo, but they eventually closed. Last year Shinichiro (Shin) and Yukiko (Yuki) Ito took over the spot and kept the name, although they offered something Tbilisi had not yet seen – Japanese street food.

Our water glasses were filled to the brim with amber rkatsiteli. After the toast, Ramaz carefully lifted his glass to his nose, followed with a connoisseur’s affirmative head tilt and knocked it back, not coming up for air until the glass was dry. “Super wine!” he exclaimed, smacking his lips and exhibiting the most sophisticated appreciation I had yet witnessed in the birthplace of wine. These were the years locals described wine as either “clean” or not. No one evaluated the nose or flavors because wine was what you washed a sagging table full of food down with, toast after toast, to the bottom, pitcher by pitcher. We judged wine by hangover intensity. The milder the headache, the cleaner – and better – the wine.

We have a Georgian friend named Besik who worked in the Sudanese desert removing landmines. At base camp he came across an old pressure cooker and copper tubing and fashioned himself a little still he filled with fermented bananas. To his workmates, Beso was nothing less than a hero, as Sudan had been dry since 1983. “But banana chacha?” we cried. “Sure,” he said. “You can make chacha from any fruit.” Technically, chacha is fermented grape pomace, but the word is also synonymous with “white lightening” and is used to describe any fruit-based spirit, including quince, feijoa and melon. There is now a flower-based chacha, too, thanks to a Tbilisi woman who has created a smooth distillation from lilacs.

Someone once said that humanitarian workers are like mercenaries, missionaries or madmen. It is a description we have also applied to expats who end up in far-flung places like Georgia. Like the foreigner out in the secluded Kakhetian village of Argokhi, between the Alazani River and the Caucasus Mountains, who has forged his life growing a nearly extinct variety of native wheat and baking it into bread; but he is no madman. He’s a Frenchman. We had first heard about Jean-Jacques Jacob some years ago while visiting the Alaverdi Monastery in Kakheti, when a friend pointed north of the giant cathedral and told us of a Frenchman who had started a farm in the middle of nowhere.