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.

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.

We pull off the recently finished section of highway at the Argveta exit in Imereti, follow Google Maps to a hand-painted sign directing us along a bumpy lane to an open iron gate with painted flowers, and park our car as if we live here. The front yard is lush with fruit trees, children’s toys are neatly scattered about, and a hammock under the shade of a large walnut invites us to lounge next to an enormous stone table. Before we sit here and never get up, Giorgi Zhorzhorladze steps out of his neat two-story house trimmed in red bricks, greets us with a warm “Gamarjoba!” (“Hello there!”) and welcomes us inside, to another realm.

This year was going to be a big one for Oda Family Winery. Since its humble beginning in 2016, the winery and family farm-to-table restaurant in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region had been carefully expanding with the increasing popularity of its outstanding wine and formidable fare. This year, Keto Ninidze and Zaza Gagua calculated 3,000 guests would visit their restaurant, located in the front yard of their family’s oda (a traditional wooden two-storey house) in Martvili, so they emptied their savings and added new washrooms and a storage room for wine equipment, made a larger garden, and advertised for seven more employees to add to their staff of three. Then coronavirus arrived. “Thank God I didn’t hire any of the applicants and they didn’t leave their jobs,” Keto says.

We recently spoke to Lisa Granik MW about her book, “The Wines of Georgia” (Infinite Ideas, November 2019). Granik became a Master of Wine in 2006, and was a Professor of Wine at the New York Institute of Technology from 2013-15. Currently she advises wine companies and regions seeking to improve their sales in the United States. Granik, who has written for publications such as The New York Times, The World of Fine Wine and Sommelier Journal, dives into Georgian wine culture in this title, explaining not only grape varieties, terroirs, winemaking methods and viticulture but also the centrality of wine to Georgian culture generally.

Sunday, April 19, was Easter in the Orthodox Christian world, the holiest day of the year. Like most people in today’s pandemic world, Maka Shengelia, one of our walk leaders in Tbilisi, was home being a responsible citizen. But she was also spreading butter on her own freshly baked paska, Easter bread, popular in the Eastern Church. It is a tall, dome-shaped cake, inseparable from Easter’s other “edible decoration,” boiled eggs dyed a deep magenta with endro (madder root). God will forgive you for celebrating Easter without going to church, but commemorating it without red eggs and paska is another matter entirely.

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.

As winter descends over Istanbul, cloaking the city in gray rain clouds that make for beautiful sunsets but unpleasant commutes, we flee the many open-air eating options in the city for cozier digs, replacing outdoor meyhane feasts and rakı toasts with homey bowls of lentil soup and steaming cups of tea. Yet when we’re craving a place that is warm in ways beyond food, the average Istanbul lokanta often leaves something to be desired. Which is why, on a recent rainy Friday evening, we were pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Galaktion, a Georgian restaurant on a cobbled side street off Taksim Square, smack dab between Istiklal Caddesi and Sıraselviler Caddesi.

Renowned orange wine expert and award winning writer Simon J. Woolf tells the full history of this ancient wine and its modern struggle to gain acceptance in Amber Revolution: How the World Learned to Love Orange Wine (Interlink Books; Fall 2018). While the focus is mainly on orange wine history and culture in Slovenia, Italy and Georgia, the book also includes profiles of 180 of the best producers from 20 countries worldwide and is crammed full of all the information you need to find the best orange wines worldwide. We spoke to Woolf about the relationship between natural and orange wine, how Georgia fits into this story, the future of orange wine and much more.

We bit into the khinkali, its handmade dough indelicate and sticky, as we like it. Steam poured out the newly made hole, and we blew lightly before slurping up the rich stock and gobbling the dumpling down, even the puckered knob. The ground pork and beef was packed with fresh cilantro, the juices absorbed into the jacket. It was a perfect khinkali. A home wrecker. This seducer of a dumpling is molded by the knowing hands of Manana Osapashvili, born in Gudamakhari, a mountain village in Pasanauri, the heartland of khinkali. A professional cook for 29 years, Manana has been making khinkali since she was 10 years old. Today, she is running the kitchen at Sioni 13, located at the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in Old Town. It is a part of the city known for its tourists and hookah bars, and the mediocre "traditionnel" Georgian restaurants that cater to them.